This web page is the first in an introductory section that explains what meaningness is, and why you might want to read a book about it.

Every page in the book has a navigation box at the bottom. In this one, you can see the several web pages that make up the introduction.

You might like to read the “general explanation” in the navigation box now, too. Then you can go on to the next page.

Let’s start this book in the middle. The main course is a ways off, and I want to give you a taste now.

Let’s talk about purpose. (Purpose is one of the dimensions of meaningness discussed in this book.)

Especially at turning points in life, people ask questions like:

• Is there any purpose at all in living? Or is everything completely pointless?
• What am I supposed to do?
• How can I choose among the many ways I could spend the rest of my life?
• Does everyone’s life have the same purpose, or does everyone have their own?
• Where does purpose come from? Does it have some ultimate source, or is it just a personal invention?

Various religions, philosophies, and systems claim to have answers. Some are complicated, and they all seem quite different. When you strip away the details, though, there are only a half dozen fundamental answers. Each is appealing in its own way, but also problematic. Understanding clearly what is right and wrong about each approach can resolve the underlying problem.

Let’s go through these alternatives briefly. I will explain each one in detail in the middle part of the book.

Five confused attitudes to purpose

Everything has a fixed purpose, given by some sort of fundamental ordering principle of the universe. (This might be God, or Fate, or the Cosmic Plan, or something.) Humans too have a specific role to play in the proper order of the universe.

This is the stance of eternalism. It may be comfortable. If you just follow the eternal law, everything will come out right. Unfortunately, it often seems that much of life has no purpose. At any rate, you cannot figure out what it is supposed to be. Priests or other authority figures claim to know what the cosmic purposes are, but their advice often seems wrong for particular situations.

For these reasons, even people who are explicitly committed to eternalism generally fall into other stances at times.

Nothing has any purpose. Life is meaningless. Any purposes you imagine you have are illusions, errors, or lies.

This is the stance of nihilism. It appears quite logical. It might seem to follow naturally from some scientific facts: everything is made of subatomic particles; they certainly don’t have purposes; and you can’t get purpose by glomming together a bunch of purposeless bits.

It is easy to fall into nihilism in moments of despair; but, fortunately, it is difficult to maintain, and hardly anyone holds it for long. Nevertheless, the seemingly compelling logic of nihilism needs an answer. It turns out that it is quite wrong, as a matter again of science and logic. But because that is not obvious, three other stances try (and fail) to find a middle way between eternalism and nihilism.

The supposed cosmic purposes are doubtful at best, but obviously, people do have goals. There are human purposes no one can seriously doubt: survival, health, sex, romance, fame, power, enjoyable experiences, children, beautiful things. Realistically, those are what everyone pursues anyway. You might as well drop the hypocritical pretense of “higher” purposes and go for what you really want.

This is the stance of materialism. Realistically, most people adopt this stance much of the time. However, at times everyone does recognize the value of altruistic and creative purposes, which this stance rejects. Moreover, most recognize that materialism is an endless treadmill: the enjoyment of new goodies wears off quickly, and then you are left craving the next, better thing.

You can’t take it with you. After you are dead, it is meaningless how many toys you had. What matters is how you live your life: whether you create something of beauty or value for others. You have unique capabilities to improve the world, and it’s your responsibility to find and act on your personal gift.

This is the stance of mission. The problem is that no one actually has a “unique personal gift.” God does not have plans for us. People waste a lot of time and effort trying to find “their purpose in life,” and are miserable when they fail. Besides that, rejecting material purposes causes you to overlook genuine opportunities for enjoyment and satisfaction.

Since the universe (or God) does not supply us with purposes, they are human creations. Mostly people mindlessly adopt purposes that are handed to them by society. You need to throw those off, and choose your own purposes, as an act of creative will.

This is the stance of existentialism.1 It is based on the assumption that if purposes are not objective, or externally given, they must be subjective, or internally created. Existentialism holds out hope for freedom. But it is not actually possible to create your own purposes. Choosing at random would be pointless, and impossible; and what purely personal basis could you have for choosing one purpose over another?

Resolving confusion

Each of these confused stances treats meaning as fixed by an external force, or denies meaning or some aspect of it.

The central message of this book is that meaning is real (and cannot be denied), but is fluid (so it cannot be fixed). It is neither objective (given by God) nor subjective (chosen by individuals).

The book offers resolutions to problems of meaning that avoid denial, fixation, and the impossibility of total self-determination. These resolutions are non-obvious, and sometimes unattractive; but they are workable in ways the alternatives are not.

• 1. Actually, it is more-or-less what existentialists called “authenticity.” Using that term would be confusing, because existentialist “authenticity” hasn’t got all that much to do with the everyday sense of the word.

Eternalism and nihilism are the simplest, and most extreme, stances toward meaningness.

• Eternalism says that everything has a definite, true meaning.
• Nihilism says that nothing really means anything.

Both these stances are wrong, factually. They are also unworkable, in their implications for living.

However, almost everyone falls into them at times, triggered by particular contexts. Each stance is based on genuine insights, and a powerful, emotionally appealing pattern of thinking. They also can seem to be the only possible alternatives, so we are forced into one by the repulsive qualities of the other.

Understanding the logic of eternalism and nihilism, and the resolution of the fundamental problem they address, is key to unlocking the material covered in this book. Because they are simple and extreme, the logic of these two stances is particularly clear. The other confused stances arise mainly as failing attempts to find some compromise between them.

This page is a brief introduction to eternalism, nihilism, and the third possibility that resolves them. I cover the same topics in much greater detail later in the book.

Eternalism and its discontents

Eternalism and nihilism are both responses to the ambiguity of meaningness. In personal experience, meanings seem to resist focus, shift, and come and go. Moreover, people disagree about what things mean. Perhaps meanings are just a matter of opinion? Meaning is important enough that this uncertainty is emotionally unacceptable.

The strategy of eternalism is to deny the ambiguity. Despite appearances, it says, everything does have a clear and definite meaning, which is not merely subjective. We might not perceive it, or we might mistake it, but it exists.

If meanings are objective, not human creations, it may seem they must come from some ultimate, transcendent source. In many systems, that is a God. In others, it is an abstraction, like Fate or Reason or the Absolute. These are supposed to provide the sole source of meaning, purpose, value, and ethics. I refer to any such source as an eternal ordering principle or Cosmic Plan.

Luckily, there is no eternal ordering principle, so eternalism is false as a fact-claim. Arguments about that never seem to persuade anyone, however. So I take this hyper-atheism for granted, and instead ask: what are our options if eternalism is wrong?

Here it is helpful to understand what works, and doesn’t work, about eternalism (and the other confused stances) emotionally, rather than in terms of truth.

The appeal of eternalism is that questions of life-purpose and ethics have clear, simple answers. If you act in accordance with this Cosmic Plan, you are guaranteed a good outcome. You can be assured that seeming chaos and senseless misery are all orderly parts of the will of an all-good principle.

Even if it were factually true, eternalism could not deliver on this sales pitch. The compelling emotional logic breaks down in some contexts. In those situations, adopting the eternalist stance makes you think and act in ways that lead to big trouble.

It is difficult to see how the suffering caused by earthquakes could be willed by a benevolent God, or meaningful, or anything other than disasters that just happened. The difficulty of maintaining willful blindness to meaninglessness is an obstacle to eternalism. It is hard not to fall into the confused stance that most things are God’s will, but not the bad bits. Once you admit that some things are meaningless, the logic of eternalism starts to fall apart.

To defend against that, you have to hallucinate a pastel-colored Disneyfied world in which everything works out for the best in the end, there is a silver lining in every cloud, everyone is beautiful inside, and all the world needs is love.

Threats to this vision must be destroyed. Eternalist kitsch rapidly switches to self-righteous vengeance when contradicted.

Eternalism also requires you to submit to the Cosmic Plan, to do as it demands, rather than pursuing your own goals. It is often unclear what God wants you to do, and sometimes what he wants is insane and harmful. Then you either do the apparently right thing, which erodes your commitment to his ethical code, or you follow the prescription. If that has the expected bad result, you must blind yourself to that, and harden yourself against the temptation to weaken the code to fit reality.

Much good is left undone because eternalism did not recommend it, and much harm is done in its name. We also lose the freedom of courage: the freedom to risk, to take actions whose results we cannot predict. Armored eternalism condemns such creativity.

Nihilism and its discontents

Nihilism starts from the intelligent recognition that eternalism is false and unworkable. Most events are meaningless; meaning is not objective; there is no Cosmic Plan.

Nihilism then simply inverts the core claim of eternalism: it says everything is really meaningless. Seeming meanings are illusory or arbitrary or subjective, and therefore unreal or unimportant.

This stance is unworkable. Meaning is obvious everywhere, and it takes elaborate intellectualization to explain it away. Attempting to live without significance, purpose, or value leads to rage, anguish, alienation, depression, and exhaustion.

Kitsch is worthy of contempt, but—through fear of being duped again—we extend contempt beyond kitsch to anything that affirms meaning. This makes defiant nihilism actively hostile to more-or-less everything, but particularly beauty, virtue, kindness, and whatever else makes life worth living.

Eternalism blinds us by a simple effort of will, or faith. Such simple stupidity is insufficient for nihilism: it is not possible to use mere force to fool ourselves that there is no meaning in the world. Instead, nihilism uses intelligence against itself to produce stupidity. Somehow meaning must be explained away by intellectual sleight-of-hand. A theory is needed that can distract us from the obvious. This theory has to get complicated quickly in order to be sufficiently confusing, or so brilliantly insightful as to dazzle us into submission. This intellectual stupidity masquerades as intelligence.

Denying meaning blinds one to beauty, making all reality dull gray. Denying purpose produces paralysis, with no possibility of choice and so no action. Denying significance suggests that there is no urgency to do anything about it.

In depression, you recoil from the overwhelming vastness and complexity of reality. You feel lost in space. You put yourself in a box to create comforting limits. Nihilism shuts down emotions to deny passion.

A false dichotomy, and failing compromises

When in the eternalist stance, it may seem that the only alternative is nihilism, and vice versa. Because each has obvious dire faults, we adopt whichever seems less bad in a particular situation. Because one looks worse, we try to stabilize ourselves in the other, declaring allegiance to it and viewing the opposite as the enemy. But this is impossible. Instead, we often squirm back and forth between the two in a sneaky, panicked way. It’s common for people to switch between eternalism and nihilism repeatedly in the space of a few minutes. Once you start to see this pattern, and catch yourself doing it, it becomes funny.

An alternate strategy is to try to find a compromise. Without thinking about it carefully, we suppose that the world is somewhat governed by an eternal organizing principle (even if we are staunch atheists), and that the world is also somewhat horribly meaningless (even if we are committed eternalists). Some things, we suppose, have definite meaning, and others are definitely meaningless.

The various “confused stances” discussed later in this book arise in this way. Each is a bargain in which we reluctantly acknowledge meaninglessness in some parts of life, deny it in others, and try to get the world to accept that. But it doesn’t; so every compromise causes new trouble, and fails.

The wrong idea underlying all confused stances is that things must be either definitely meaningful or else effectively meaningless. Or, if meaning is not objective, it must be subjective. But these are not the only possibilities.

Completion: meaningness

I have coined the word “meaningness” to express the ambiguous quality of meaningfulness and meaninglessness that we encounter in practice. According to the stance that recognizes meaningness, meaning is real but not definite. It is neither objective nor subjective. It is neither given by an external force nor a human invention.

I call this a “complete stance” because it acknowledges two qualities: nebulosity or indefiniteness, and pattern or regularity. A complete stance does not deny any aspect of meaningness.

From point of view of the complete stance, eternalism and nihilism are each half right. Eternalism rightly recognizes that the world is meaningful to us, and that it must be accepted as it is. This is the acknowledgement of pattern: the world in all its variety, pain and pleasure alike. Nihilism rightly recognizes that there is no eternal source of meaning, so there is no ultimate basis or necessity for rejecting anything. This is the acceptance of nebulosity: the chaos and contingency of the world, and the recognition that we are free from divine law.

This book is about meaningness. “Meaningness” is a word I invented, referring to the quality of being meaningful and/or meaningless.

The word “meaning” has two quite different meanings in English. It can refer to the meaning of symbols, such as words and road signs. This book is not about that kind of meaning.

People also speak of “the meaning of life.” That is the sort of meaningness this book is about. So I apply “meaningness” only to the sorts of things one could describe as “deeply meaningful” or “pretty meaningless.” The book is about matters such as purpose, ethics, and selfhood.

Meaningness is a quality, not a thing. I don’t think there is a definite meaning of life. Meaningness is always nebulous: indefinite, uncertain, ambiguous.

The suffix -ness constantly reminds one of this nebulosity. I mostly avoid the word “meaning,” because it builds in the assumption that something meaningful has one specific meaning. Often, that is wrong.

I use “meaningness” in three closely-related ways, referring to:

• the quality of being meaningful and/or meaningless
• the study of, or ideas about, this quality
• a particular stance toward the quality: the one that acknowledges both meaninglessness and meaningfulness, avoiding both fixation and denial.

It should be clear from context which way I’m using the word in each case.

A curiously missing word

I invented the word “meaningness” because the topic of this book seemed to have no name. There seems to be no -ology or -osophy devoted to it.

There are various -ologies devoted to meanings. For example, semantics studies the meanings of words. This book is not about that.

The various dimensions of meaningness are discussed in religion and philosophy; but, strangely, the topic as a whole is never addressed.

Neither religion nor philosophy

My approach in this book is non-religious and non-philosophical. It is meant for readers who have rejected religious answers. Those who have figured out that philosophy also lacks answers may be even more intrigued.

It will be obvious that the book is non-religious. It’s anti-religious to the extent that most religions are eternalist, and rejection of eternalism is one of my main themes. I take atheism as a given; it’s barely worth mentioning, much less arguing for.

Less obviously, the book is also non-philosophical, and perhaps even anti-philosophical. It is meant as a practical manual. I hope it is useful to anyone who struggles with questions like “what should I do with my life?” and “how ethical should I be?” and “do I have a special destiny, or is my life going to have no meaning beyond the ordinary?”

Isn’t it odd that philosophy has no branch devoted to meaningness? Especially since meaningness is exactly what regular people, who haven’t studied philosophy, usually think philosophy is about?

In ancient times, philosophers did ask the big questions of meaningness. (I’m fond of Diogenes, whose picture heads this page.) Nowadays, big questions are considered embarrassingly naive. The proper job of a philosopher is to make tiny technical corrections in esoteric theories that probably have no connection with reality.

In recent philosophical history, existentialism was an exception. It was willing to ask the important questions. It avoided the error of eternalism, by rejecting definite, objective meanings. However, it wrongly supposed that meaningness is merely subjective, and thereby came to an acknowledged nihilistic dead end.

Particular branches of current philosophy address particular dimensions of meaningness. For instance, normative moral philosophy tries to answer some questions about ethics—one dimension of meaningness. Later in the book, I argue that nearly all current ethical theories are either eternalist or nihilist, and therefore wrong. The wrong answers come from asking wrong questions. I will suggest better questions, and beginnings of answers.

I was inspired to write this book when I saw many of my friends struggling with the question “what is my true purpose in life?”

This struggle makes you miserable. Finding your “true mission” is difficult. It might seem that it ought to be obvious, but my friends seemed to fail repeatedly. There is no pragmatic, straightforward means to discover your mission; you need to use non-ordinary techniques, such as psychotherapy, divination, or dream work. At times they would be excited because they had finally found it—but a month or two later, they realized they had been mistaken. What they had thought was their true mission turned out not to be. Then they would lapse into depression, for months or years, during which they seemed to do nothing much—just surviving. Of course, they said, since they didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing, it was not surprising that they weren’t accomplishing anything.

I think the reason you can’t find your mission in life is that there is no such thing. That answer seems unacceptable, though, if there is only one alternative: materialism.

If there is not something I was put on earth to do, perhaps all that’s left is to join the rat-race of accumulation and personal gratification? But everyone understands that is unsatisfying: a dead end. We have tried materialism, and seen that it fails. You can pursue money, sex, popularity, and power for a while, but either you find you can’t get enough, or it turns to cardboard in your mouth when you do.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Some people pursue mission relentlessly; others materialism. Most flip-flop. In any case, these alternatives both produce disappointment, depression, at times anguish.

This is an example of what we could call “existential suffering” or “spiritual suffering.” It is suffering due to one’s relationship with meaningness. Purpose is one dimension of meaningness.

I believe this kind of suffering is unnecessary. It is caused by wrong attitudes toward meaningness. Those can be replaced with accurate ones, and then you are freed from it.

Of course, most suffering is not existential, or spiritual. Most suffering is practical: concrete circumstances are unsatisfactory. I haven’t got much to say about practical suffering, except that it often has practical solutions. Spiritual suffering is eradicated by replacing supposedly-spiritual problems (like “what is my life purpose?”) with practical ones—which you may be able to make progress on.

Mission and materialism are not the only possibilities. You can, instead, do things that you enjoy and that are useful to others.

“But how do I know what to dedicate my life to?” Wrong question… a good question to ask instead is “What is something I can do now that will be both enjoyable and useful?” That’s a practical problem. You can find answers without using religious or therapeutic voodoo.

It’s an unattractive question, however. “What is my true mission in life?” promises that if only you can find the answer, and you throw your whole self into your mission, you will be a very special person. Along the way, you will have certainty, and when you die, you will die justified.

“What’s something useful and enjoyable I can do now?” prompts the answer “Who cares—so what?” Mere usefulness and enjoyability doesn’t sound good enough. This “complete stance”—of enjoyable usefulness—is emotionally unattractive at first. Once accepted, though, it does eliminate the anguish of an existential dilemma. If you can let go of the grandiosity that leads you to imagine that some special task awaits you, and the false hope that getting enough of what you want would make life satisfactory, you can be useful and enjoy yourself. That letting-go takes some doing; I will suggest ways to go about it.

This book addresses a series of dilemmas of this sort. I call them “dimensions of meaningness.” Each dimension has a limited number of possible approaches, or “stances.”

The commonly available confused stances are each unworkable, because they are based on misunderstandings of how meaning works. For example, it is easy to waste a huge amount of emotional energy trying to be special or ordinary; to while your life away in mindless conformity or unrealistic rebellion; to play the victim or fail when you attempt to take total responsibility for your world. Adopting those stances makes you miserable.

For each dimension, I suggest an uncommon, alternative stance that resolves the misunderstanding, and turns a spiritual problem into a practical one.

“Stances” are simple patterns of thinking and feeling about meaningness.

This part of the book explains what stances are and how they work in general.

The following part looks at many specific stances in detail.

Mostly, people think about thinking about meaning in terms of systems. (By “systems,” I mean religions, philosophies, political ideologies, psychological frameworks, and so on.) But I think that is not how we actually think about meaningness.

When I say “think about thinking about,” I mean that if you ask “How do you think about questions of meaning, value, purpose, or ethics,” the answer is something like “I’m a Christian / existentialist / progressive / Jungian.” Or more likely, nowadays when few people want to commit to a single system, they may mention several.

It seems to me that this is a mistake. In practice, when we actually need to make decisions, we do it mainly on the basis of stances, not systems.

Stances are simple, compelling patterns of thinking and feelings concerning meaningness. For example: “I’m an ordinary guy,” or “the only real purpose in life is to squeeze as much pleasure out of it as you can before you die,” or “good people follow the rules,” or “everyone is responsible for their personal reality.”

Whatever system, or systems, someone believes in, they probably often adopt stances that contradict it. For example, Christians, in everyday life, often act on the basis of materialism. (I have never been a Christian, but I know this by reading books by Christian pastors, who say this is a big problem.) Progressives also fall into materialism—another contradiction. Many professed Christians say that “all is one, really”—the stance of monism—which goes against the central teaching of Christianity.

Systems are big, complicated things with lots of details you are supposed to believe and do. Systems have salespeople, who argue passionately in their favor.

Stances are very simple, and don’t require any specific beliefs or practices. No one explicitly promotes them. You pick them up automatically from our cultural “thought soup.” They are the ways people talk about meaning in soap operas and cafes.

Confused stances are insidious, because they are unnoticed. Because no one argues for them, no one argues against them. They are memes, mental viruses that people propagate by talking, without awareness of them.

Systems can help stabilize particular stances. Christianity, for instance, tries to stabilize eternalism—the idea that everything has a definite meaning given by God. Its detailed ideology provides support for this idea. If you are Christian and wobbling out of eternalism, it provides things to say to yourself to counteract that.

This works only to a limited extent. The experience of Christians is that “everyone falls into temptation.” That is not only the temptation of unethical actions—more seriously, it is acting on the basis of stances that contradict the religion’s core teachings.

In times of crisis, longing, or doubt, one is likely to express one’s feelings to friends somewhat like this:

A lot of the time I don’t know what I should be doing. I mean, regular life is pretty meaningless, isn’t it? I know I must have been put on earth for some reason. I’m an artist, really. I’m not one of those mindless drones who sleepwalks through life. I can see what’s real; that’s the artist’s job. Discover yourself, discover reality. But I’m not sure what my artistic medium is meant to be.

Life basically just sucks, mostly. It seems like there has to be a better way; we can’t be meant to be miserable all the time. There has to be some ultimate purpose to existence.

I guess I do believe in God. I mean, maybe not as some guy up in Heaven, but something way bigger than us. Stuff doesn’t just happen; there has to be a reason for things. I mean, ultimately, it’s all one, isn’t it? I guess you could say I’m spiritual, sort of, but not religious. Organized religion is stupid. It’s all phony niceness. Real life isn’t like that. People walk all over you if you are too nice. You have to look out for yourself.

A lot of the time I think, OK, I’ll do a regular job, I can fit in, I can make a steady salary instead of being a starving artist. I’ve done that, you know? But the corporate world is all rigged against you. You can’t get ahead. We should sweep that away and create a just society, one that works for real people, not the greedy CEOs and politicians. They are the ones making war and polluting the earth and stuff.

I want to make the world a better place. I think most people do. I’ve got some friends who are political, you know, trying to change things. But I don’t see that they are going to make any difference. And anyway, in the long run, what difference could it make? In a hundred years, we’re all dead, and no one’s going to care. Might as well live for the moment, you know!

Because the confused stances fail to match reality, they are all unstable. As mind-states, they come and go. We flip-flop between them.

The speaker in the monologue above goes through a dozen stances in the space of a minute or two: nihilism, mission, true self, specialness, eternalism, causality, monism, materialism, reasonable respectability, victim-think, romantic rebellion, and back to mission and materialism again. (You might like to re-read it and pick these out.)

This invented speech may be somewhat exaggerated; usually stances persist a little longer, and it would be unusual to get through so many in a single moan-session. (He sounds like he might have ingested some substance that makes mental states less stable.) But I have often listened sympathetically as a friend in crisis has gone through several contradictory stances in an hour or so.

Because we aren’t aware of stances at all, we don’t notice this happening. We don’t see how dramatically we contradict ourselves.

Once you are aware of relating to meaningness in terms of such stances, you can catch yourself (and your friends) sliding from one to another like this. The flip-flopping is often accompanied by anxiety, which can produce defiant negativity or fake sweetness. Those are one clue that you are caught up in a confused stance. Stances allied to nihilism come with defiant negativity, and those allied to eternalism make you sound like a Hallmark greeting card.

Each confused stance tends to lead to one of a small number of following stances. Each stance has a logic that fails as you pursue it. As that becomes obvious, there is a natural next thought that slides you into a following stance without noticing.

For example, in the stance of respectability, it makes sense to have an ordinary job and fit in. But this involves cutting off your creativity, which is unacceptable. Recognizing this, you may move to the stance of victim-think, if you feel coerced into conformity. That makes you angry, and you think of forcibly changing conditions, in an unrealistic way: the stance of romantic rebellion.

This instability is one reason stances trump systems. No matter how determined you are to stick to a system, the stances connected with it are likely to slide out from under you.

Later in the book, I discuss each of the stances in detail, and as part of that I look at the logic that can lead from each to others. That lets you anticipate the wrong moves your thinking is likely to make, and helps counter them.

The antidotes to this whole process are the complete stances. Unfortunately, they too are unstable. They are unstable not because they fail to fit reality, but because they don’t offer the emotional pay-offs the confused stances do.

Once one has decided that the confused stances are unworkable, and that the complete stances are accurate, one can work toward stabilizing the complete ones.

Also, one can work on further destabilizing the confused stances, so they do not persist. Simply recognizing them, and seeing the logic of how they flop from one to the next, is one way to do that.

“Nebulosity” means “cloud-like-ness.” Meaningness is cloud-like. It is real, but impossible to completely pin down.

Nebulosity is the key to understanding confusions about meaningness. That is a central point of this book.

Cloud-like

“Nebulosity” refers to the intangible, transient, amorphous, non-separable, ambiguous nature of meaningness.1

• From a distance, clouds can look solid; close-up they are mere fog, which can even be so thin it becomes invisible when you enter it.
• If you watch a cloud for a few minutes, it may change shape and size, or evaporate into nothing. But it is impossible to find an exact moment at which it ceases to exist.
• Clouds often have vague boundaries and no particular shape.
• It can be impossible to say where one cloud ends and another begins; whether two bits of cloud are connected or not; or to count the number of clouds in a section of the sky.
• It can be impossible to say even whether there is a cloud in a particular place, or not.

Meanings behave in these ways, too.

The nebulosity of meaningness

“Meaning” can apply to many things: words, art works, or “life,” for example. The meanings even of words can never be fully specified. To varying degrees, they are ambiguous. Art is more extensively indefinite. The matters that might be called “spiritual”—which are the main topics of this book—are still more nebulous.

Because “spiritual” concerns are so insubstantial, perhaps it would be useful to look first at the nebulosity of the meaning of an art work, such as a piece of instrumental music.

• When you think of the piece as a whole, its meaningfulness can seem quite solid. But when listening to it, you cannot say “this bit means this, and that bit means that.” The meaning becomes thin and wispy, in a sense.
• What an art work means can change over time. Some songs that were tremendously meaningful when I was fifteen seem quite meaningless now. The meaning of the religious carvings of the Rapanui people of Easter Island is mostly permanently lost.
• It is very difficult to say anything about what instrumental music means—even when you are sure it is highly meaningful.
• Music comes in separate pieces (such as songs), maybe with separate meanings. But life does not come in well-defined chunks. “Spiritual” meanings are not clearly separable; they flow or shade into each other.
• Meaningfulness and meaninglessness also shade into each other. Meaningness has infinite gradations of intangibility. It can be impossible to say whether something has meaning or not.

People often disagree about meanings. This can be because one person is right and the other wrong. However, often the difficulty is not that we don’t know what the true meaning is, but that it is inherently ambiguous.2 It is a feature of reality, not of knowledge. As we will see later, meaningness is not objective—but it is not subjective, either.

Nebulosity is unwelcome

The nebulosity of meaningness causes various problems: practical, social, and psychological. (Much of this book describes such problems.) Often, people would like to get rid of nebulosity, or pretend that it is not there.

Confused stances are attitudes to meaningness that refuse to acknowledge nebulosity. One strategy is to fixate meanings, attempting to deny their nebulosity by trying to make them solid, eternal, and unambiguous. Another is to deny meaningfulness altogether, or to say that it is not important, or cannot be known.

Because meaningness is both nebulous and real, these confused stances fail, and cause new, worse problems.

Complete stances acknowledge nebulosity, and its inseparable partner, pattern.

• 1. I will not give a precise definition of “nebulosity” here. Instead, I present analogies. I apologize if the meaning of “nebulosity” seems frustratingly nebulous. I find that unsatisfactory myself. I hope that an understanding of the word will emerge from its use later in the book. I believe that a rigorous definition is possible; but it would be highly technical. I explain some reasons for that in my page on nebulosity and “emptiness.”
• 2. In the language of philosophy, nebulosity is an ontological fact, not an epistemological one. As a result, my accounts of eternalism and nihilism differ somewhat from the related accounts given by Robert Ellis. His philosophy is exclusively epistemological, and rejects ontological claims altogether.

On the last page, I explained that meanings, like clouds, are nebulous: intangible, non-separable, transient, amorphous, and ambiguous. Meanings are also more or less patterned: reliable, distinct, enduring, clear, and definite.

Nebulosity and pattern might seem to contradict each other, but almost always they come together. Meaning is usually nebulous to some extent, and patterned to some extent.

It can be hard to accept that meaningness is a matter of degree, not either/or. This book is about the confusions that come from assuming meaning must be either totally patterned, or entirely non-existent.

Seeing pattern

Pattern is what makes the world interpretable—what makes it make sense. Perceiving pattern is needed for all effective action—whether you are a person or a bug. Our brains and senses evolved largely to find the patterns that make survival and reproduction possible.

Patterns are everywhere in our experience. The material world is full of patterns: shapes, processes, connections, similarities and differences. Society, culture, thought, and concepts are also patterned.

Since this book is about meaningness, patterns of meaning are particularly relevant.

Being mistaken about pattern

Psychological research shows that people frequently perceive patterns that are not actually there. The brain automatically interprets even completely random events as meaningful. This tendency is called “patternicity” or “apophenia”.

Extreme apophenia is a symptom of psychosis, hallucinogenic drugs, and much of religious experience. But mild examples are universal. It is impossible not to see faces where there are none.

It is also possible, and common, to miss patterns that do exist. (Science, for instance, could be described as a search for non-obvious patterns.)

The brain, however, seems to be wired to give patterns the benefit of the doubt. It would rather make the mistake of seeing non-existent patterns than of rejecting real ones. (Maybe this is because, during evolution, missing real, dangerous patterns was worse than overreacting to imaginary ones.)

Patternicity, eternalism, and nihilism

The natural tendency to see meaningful patterns, even where there are none, makes humans vulnerable to eternalism. Eternalism is the stance that everything is meaningful. It is a cognitive form of apophenia (patternicity).

Eternalism is the core stance of most religions. Mistaken perceptions of meanings are a key to the psychology of religion. (A crude but amusing and particularly clear example is the veneration of supposed religious imagery miraculously arising in random shapes, such as the famous grilled cheese sandwich whose splotches looked like the Virgin Mary’s face.)

The brain’s unwillingness to overlook possible patterns is part of what makes nihilism less common than eternalism. Nihilism is the rejection of all meaning. Although nearly everyone sometimes adopts nihilism momentarily, it is difficult to maintain for long. Meaningful patterns are too obvious.

There are two fundamental ways to try to reject nebulosity: by fixating or denying meaningness.

Fixation

Fixation is the strategy of insisting that meanings are clear, definite, permanent, discrete, and objectively certain.

Meaningness is like open ocean: vast, unpredictable, always in motion.1 When meaningness appears murky, chaotic, and disputable, fixation is a natural response.

In fixation, you cling to relatively solid fragments of meaningness and try to lash them together into a raft. Standing shakily on a bundle of splinters, you visualize grass beneath your feet, and try not to feel the rocking of the sea. “Here we are on dry land,” you proclaim. “Here we will build a fortress to keep us safe from the chaos of uncertainty.”

You might as well try to build your castle on a cloud. Since meaningness is inherently nebulous, it cannot work. Whenever an unusually big wave comes along, it tips you off your raft and back in the sea. Later in this book, in the eternalism chapter, we’ll look in detail at common ways you may respond to these inevitable failures. Among these are sentimentality and self-righteous aggression.

Another common reaction: when your own attempts at fixation fail, you may invoke an eternal ordering principle, such as God. These are invented as omnipotent, external forces that fixate meaningness. “God works in mysterious ways. This senseless horror is all part of the Cosmic Plan, even though we cannot understand why.”

Denial

Denial is the strategy of refusing to admit that meaningness exists, or insisting that it is unimportant, for example because it is purely subjective.

When it is obvious that certainty is impossible, that meanings can never be established objectively, that ultimately there is nothing to stand on, denial is a natural response. Meaningness seems too fickle to be relied on. Better to abandon it altogether. Better to try to live in the black emptiness of outer space.

Attempts at denial also always fail, when the pattern of meaningness becomes obvious. No matter how far you are from a planet, the sky is spangled by pinpoint lights of distant stars.

Again, in the nihilism chapter, we’ll investigate common responses to failures of denial. These include defiant rage, intellectualization, and depression.

Mirror images

Fixation and denial are both rejections of nebulosity; and in a sense they are the same rejection. Each fixation is also a denial, and vice versa. Each fixation denies the opposite of what it fixates.

For example, the stance of ethical eternalism fixates a moral code; but that implies denying ethical ambiguity and freedom. Conversely, ethical nihilism denies all ethical imperatives, which implies fixating ethical uncertainty.

• 1. I have taken this metaphor from Will Buckingham’s remarkable book Finding Our Sea-Legs: Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories, about the failure of ethical eternalism.

Confused stances are strategies for avoiding accepting nebulosity. Each confused stance applies the basic methods of fixation and denial to different aspects of meaningness.

This means that these wrong ideas come in mirror-image pairs. In each pair, one stance fixates what the other denies, and vice versa.

Mirror images

Eternalism and nihilism are the simplest confused stances. Eternalism attempts to fixate all meaningness. Nihilism attempts to deny all meaningness.

Because meaningness is always both nebulous and patterned, eternalism and nihilism both always fail.

Each of the other confused stances denies some aspect of meaningness and fixates another.1 Therefore, they are attempts at compromise between eternalism and nihilism. These increasingly complicated compromises also fail; every dimension of meaningness is both nebulous and patterned.

As a simple example, the stance of true self fixates personal continuity. It insists that there is a mental thing within us that is stable, well-defined, and fully separate: the self. It denies personal nebulosity: the inaccessibility, incoherence, variability, transience, and patchwork quality of this supposed self. The mirror-image stance of no-self fixates personal discontinuity. It denies the pattern of the self: the personality quirks, projects, memories, and relationships that make up an individual.

As a more complicated example, the stances of mission and materialism both fixate personal purpose. However, they agree that purposes can be divided into “eternal” and “mundane” ones. Mission then fixates eternal purposes and denies mundane ones. Materialism fixates mundane purposes and denies eternal ones.

Each of these pairs polarizes meaningness into two unworkable extremes. Because both sides of the polarity refuse to recognize nebulosity (in opposite ways) both fail. Surely the truth lies somewhere in-between? Unfortunately, no: finding the middle ground cannot resolve these dilemmas.

• 1. One can say that even eternalism and nihilism do this, in a sense. Eternalism attempts to deny meaninglessness, and nihilism attempts to fixate it.

Wrong ideas about meaningness show up as pairs of polarized, opposite stances. These appear to be extreme views. Surely the truth can be found somewhere between?

Unfortunately, no. The error underlying all confused stances is their refusal to allow nebulosity. Even if some middle ground could be found, it too would reject nebulosity, and so would also be unworkable.

In fact, it’s usually impossible to find a “middle” position anyway. In each pair of confused stances, one categorically denies what the other fixates.

For instance, the stance of true self holds that there is a mysterious essence of the person; the stance of selflessness holds that there is none. The reality of selfness might be described as “between” these extremes, once it is found. But “in the middle” is not a helpful hint for where to look. What is halfway between existence and non-existence?1

To resolve confusions about meaningness, the helpful instruction is to head in the direction of nebulosity. Since both true self and selflessness are evasions of nebulosity, that direction is at right angles to the line between them.

Muddled middles

Some confused stances do arise as attempts at compromise, or at balancing or synthesizing two extremes. I call these “muddled middles.”

Here’s an example.

• The stance of mission holds that only “eternal” purposes are really meaningful. Its emotional payoff is that you get to feel morally superior and special for pursuing only lofty goals. Its cost is a failure to engage with the mundane aspects of life. Those aspects can be highly satisfying, and can become messy problems for yourself and others if neglected.
• The mirror-image stance, materialism, holds that only “mundane” purposes are really meaningful. Its emotional payoff is the simplicity and directness of pursuing your own pleasures. Its cost is losing the benefits of eternal purposes, for oneself and others.
• The muddled middle mingles materialism and mission, and fixates both of them. It is the attempt to satisfy both eternal and mundane purposes simultaneously. For example, you might pursue fame leading a media campaign to save starving Africans, or pursue groupies and a lucrative recording contract as an “alternative” “rebellious” musician.

In fact, most motivations are mixed. When pursuing eternal purposes, one usually hopes for some mundane reward, even if it is only a casual compliment from a friend. This is often sleazy and covert. Authentic compassion and creativity are possible; but there is generally a self-aggrandizing tendency operating at the same time.

This muddled middle preserves both the self-righteous justification of mission and the self-indulgent, self-protective grasping of materialism. So it combines the emotional payoffs of its parent stances. But it also combines their costs. It tends to lose the uncomplicated enjoyment-value of animal satisfaction (because you have to pretend that is not what you seek), and also the unselfconscious compassionate joy of accomplishing eternal purposes (because you have subordinated those to a materialist agenda).

The complete stance that resolves the mission-materialism polarity also recognizes both eternal and mundane purposes. However, it allows both to be nebulous. It strips both sorts of purposes of their selfish emotional payoffs, and also avoids the unnecessary emotional costs of both mission and materialism.

• 1. Buddhism often speaks of a “middle way” between extremes, including the extremes of existence and non-existence. Although this can be useful when understood in specific Buddhist contexts, it seems unhelpful and potentially confusing elsewhere. For instance, in Western thought, based in Christianity and Ancient Greek philosophy, moderation in all things is often recommended. I am not a great fan of moderation; that is not the resolution I recommend in this book. The “complete stance” I advocate accepts and incorporates extremes. In this, my approach is more similar to those of Nietzsche and Vajrayana Buddhism than to the Western or Buddhist mainstreams.

The core of this book is a method for resolving confusions about meaningness.

The method can be applied to many sorts of issues. Any topic that involves meaning and meaninglessness I call a “dimension of meaningness.” (These include, for instance, ethics, purpose, and value.)

For any dimension, the method asks:

• How does nebulosity affect the subject? That is, what makes the issue ambiguous, uncertain, changeable, or impossible to categorize?
• Why is this nebulosity unattractive? What negative emotions does it provoke?
• How are fixation and denial used to avoid acknowledging nebulosity? These two strategies try to nail the issue in place, or deny that it exists at all. They produce pairs of “confused stances,” or wrong attitudes to the subject. Why are fixation and denial appealing in this area?
• How do fixation and denial fail? (You cannot nail clouds down, but they are still real.) What are the consequences of this failure?
• Consider the possibility that the nebulosity is unavoidable. This means abandoning fixation and denial. It produces the “complete stance” for this dimension of meaningness. What are the consequences of the complete stance?
• Typically, the complete stance is actually better than the confused ones, but it seems less attractive. How can one overcome this emotional barrier, in order to adopt the complete stance?

This explanation may seem conceptual and abstract at this point. I hope soon to give you an experiential, concrete understanding of it, as well.

This book is meant to be practically useful. Most of it consists of detailed applications of the method to many different dimensions of meaningness.

You might misinterpret the method of resolution I presented on the last page as a “general dialectic,” or means of resolving all false oppositions.

(If you didn’t think that, or if the last sentence made no sense, skip this page. It’s for logic geeks only.)

General dialectics are a big deal in Continental philosophy, particularly in German Idealism. They are popularly associated particularly with Hegel. The system is usually described in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.1

The method of resolution used in this book critically involves the concept of nebulosity. It proceeds by eliminating mistaken fixations and denials of nebulosity. This method cannot resolve false oppositions in which rejection of nebulosity is not the underlying problem.

It is possible that this method could be seen as an instance of some general dialectical system. I would not find that interesting. It is nebulosity, not dialectic, that interests me.

Dialectics are also a big deal in Buddhist philosophy. The central example is Nagarjuña’s explanation of emptiness in terms of “not existence, non-existence, both, or neither.”

There is probably some sort of connection between nebulosity and emptiness. However, I think non-existence is mostly a red herring, and Nagarjuña’s four-fold logic has no obvious similarity with the method I present.

• 1. According to the Wikipedia, Hegel himself had a different formulation.

Earlier, I observed that misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable. I suggest that shifting from confused stances to complete stances can eliminate this “spiritual” suffering.

That is the point of this book. I hope it can help accomplish a positive transformation of your experience of meaningness. It is not meant to be an academic, philosophical analysis.

A couple pages back, I described a method for resolving confusions about meaningness. That explanation may have seemed dry and abstract.

On this page, I sketch one example. Although the discussion here is brief, I hope it is concrete enough that you begin to see how and why the method might work to replace unnecessary misery with joy.

An example: ethics

Let’s look at the dimension of ethics. Here are brief answers to the series of questions asked in the method of resolution.

(I will give much more detailed answers later in the book. I’ve also written more about this approach to ethics elsewhere.)

How does nebulosity manifest in ethics?

We are often faced with moral dilemmas, in which it is unclear what we should do. Usually these are situations in which different ethical norms conflict. For example, one should usually be truthful, but sometimes telling the truth would result in harm.

There doesn’t seem to be any general way of resolving such problems. Similar situations often seem to have dissimilar ethical implications; right action seems to have unlimited dependence on the context.

Why is this unattractive?

We want to do the right thing, but don’t always know what that is. This uncertainty can provoke intense anxiety.

Often we do harm that later we bitterly regret, and punish ourselves accordingly. However, we may not see how we could have avoided it, given ethical uncertainty.

How are fixation and denial used to avoid acknowledging the nebulosity of ethics?

One can try to fixate ethics by formulating totalitarian ethical codes that are supposed to tell you what to do in every situation. This is attractive because it suggests that it is possible to avoid ever being morally culpable—so long as you always follow the code.

Or, one can deny that ethics are meaningful at all, and refuse to take moral responsibility for your actions. This is another way of avoiding culpability.

How do these confused stances fail?

Ethical situations are unboundedly complex and variable. Any finite, fixed set of rules will sometimes require actions that are obviously harmful, for no reason beyond “that’s the rule.” In such cases, you are faced with the horrible choice of violating rules you believed sacred, or creating needless suffering by obeying them.

A fixed code also will fail to promote some beneficial actions in situations that present unusual opportunities.

Refusing to acknowledge ethical imperatives can sometimes work to one’s personal advantage. Obviously, it tends to harm others, though.

It also seems that humans are incapable of consistent ethical nihilism. Humans evolved to be ethical; that is just how our brains work. It’s usually impossible to avoid all shame and guilt. Even sociopaths, whose brains lack ethical function, do not often seem to have satisfactory lives.

What if ethics were unavoidably nebulous?

This opens the possibility of ethical responsiveness coupled with ethical freedom.

If ethics are unavoidably nebulous, in many situations there is no one “right thing” to do. Instead, there are alternatives with subtle trade-offs. We have the duty to pay close attention to the details, while also maintaining openness to the situation as a whole.

We also often have the privilege of choice. Where there is no definite right answer, we are free. We can choose at will. We also have room for creative improvisation: finding ethical solutions that are not applications of general principles.

This stance requires letting go of the fantasy that we could always avoid culpability. We have to accept that, inevitably, we will sometimes make ethical mistakes.

Regretting ethical mistakes makes us less likely to repeat them. However, acknowledging their inevitability means that we can let go of ethical anxiety. Ethical maturity is measured by the ability to find good-enough solutions to ethical problems, not by the amount you punish yourself.

What helps adopt the complete stance?

We need to destabilize the confused stances, by understanding their defects, and stabilize the complete one, by understanding its advantages.

In this case, confusion is destabilized by understanding that it is not feasible to achieve blamelessness, either by following the rules or by denying ethics altogether. Both approaches inevitably cause needless harm to oneself and others.

The complete stance is stabilized by understanding that ethical freedom can be a source of benevolent joy, not mean-spirited selfishness. It is stabilized by understanding that ethical responsiveness eliminates anxiety, and is not an intolerable burden of infinite responsibility without control.

Mistaken ideas about meaningness inhibit creativity, constrict your life, and make you miserable. This book is meant as a practical manual for overcoming these confused stances, liberating you from their negative effects. It offers specific antidotes for particular confusions.

Thinking differently

A “stance” is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and eventually acting. Each of those reinforces the others, and helps maintain the stance.

The methods described in this book mainly work by changing thinking. It’s also possible to work with feelings and actions; I’ll make occasional suggestions about those too.

The main method is to become familiar with the thoughts and feelings characteristic of each confused stance, so that you notice them as they occur; and then choose to think differently. Simply remembering that there is a better alternative—a complete stance—is often most of the battle. However, it’s also necessary to understand how and why this alternative is better, and that can take some work. If the complete stances were obviously better, no one would adopt the confused ones.

The next page explains the method in more detail, in terms of various “aspects” of each stance.

Similar methods

Cognitive restructuring

Cognitive restructuring is the central method of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Cognitive restructuring is also a practice of “thinking differently,” by noticing patterns of dysfunctional, emotion-laden thought, and replacing them with more accurate and functional ones. CBT, like Meaningness, suggests that patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior reinforce each other. Interestingly, like my approach, CBT draws on Eastern religion and Western philosophy.

The specific patterns of thinking/feeling/acting CBT works with, called cognitive distortions, have almost no overlap with my confused stances. So the method is similar, but the content is mainly quite different. (One point of commonality: CBT aims to overcome “absolutism,” perhaps similar to eternalism. In place of absolutism, it promotes “flexibility,” perhaps similar to the complete stance’s attitude toward nebulosity.)

Unlike CBT, Meaningness is not intended as therapy, and is not concerned with psychopathology. However, because the method is similar, the two might be complementary or synergistic. Perhaps Meaningness offers CBT practitioners an expanded set of dysfunctional patterns to address; I’m not qualified to say.

Rationalism

Several communities aim to improve normal (non-psychopathological) thinking, using a similar method. They identify common patterns of dysfunctional thought; each can be replaced with a better alternative. Among these communities are the rationalist, skeptical, and critical thinking movements.

In early versions, these movements concentrated on logical fallacies—errors in thinking alone. Increasingly, they have recognized the importance of cognitive biases, many of which involve emotions distorting thought.

The lists of these errors (linked in the previous paragraph) have little overlap with my list of confused stances. It seems likely that rationalism, skepticism, and critical thinking can be synergistic with the Meaningness approach. (That is my experience, anyway!) However, rationalism can sometimes slide into eternalism, a dysfunctional, confused stance. I’ll discuss later how to avoid that danger.

Recently, insights about cognitive biases have crossed over with CBT, as cognitive bias modification therapy. Maybe a three-way synergy is possible!

Meditation

This book grew partly out of my engagement with Buddhist philosophy. That philosophy is closely related to Buddhist meditation methods. I have found that the two support each other—as Buddhism says.

In meditation, you watch yourself thinking, without interfering. Then you discover what you are thinking, and how. It comes as a shock to most people to realize that they actually didn’t know—and another shock to learn the typical contents of their thoughts.

Because meditation reveals the process and content of your thoughts, it’s probably synergistic with any of the three “think differently” methods (Meaningness, CBT, and rationalism). And, indeed, meditation is increasingly combined with CBT to create various crossover therapies. There’s also considerable interest in meditation in the rationalist community.

According to Buddhist theory, meditation eventually allows you to experience “emptiness,” which is closely related to my “nebulosity”; and after that “the nonduality of emptiness and form,” which is related to the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern. That inseparability is the hallmark of the complete stances.

Action

Confused stances make you miserable directly; but even worse, they make you take dysfunctional actions that harm yourself and others. Some helpful interventions can replace dysfunctional actions with functional ones. These include both individual activities and social or group practices.

My current (July 2014) plan for this book does not include much material about action, but I’m coming to think it should. So, this may change.

Each stance, or basic attitude toward meaningness, is a transient pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. The Meaningness practice involves learning to recognize these patterns. Then you know what stance you are in at any moment, and ways to shift from any confused stance to a complete one.

I describe each stance in terms of a series of aspects. This page explains what the aspects are, and how noticing them is useful.

In the main part of this book, I provide a “schematic overview” page for each dimension of meaningness. The overview includes a table, with rows corresponding to the aspects of the different stances for relating to that dimension.

The discussion on this page may seem unhelpfully abstract. It will probably be useful to go back and forth between reading it and looking at an example schematic. You can see one here, covering eternalism and nihilism—the two most basic confused stances.

If you haven’t already read my introduction to eternalism and nihilism, it would be good to do that first.

The mistaken metaphysical assumption

A confused stance is based on an underlying mistaken metaphysical assumption. The assumption is usually unthought: not understood, or entirely outside awareness. Typically the assumption draws a distinction that is a false dilemma; so confused stances mainly come in pairs, which share the underlying assumption but take opposite sides of it.

Surfacing the assumption, and seeing how it is wrong, makes it possible to understand and adopt the corresponding complete stance.

What it denies and what it fixates

Each confused stance wrongly denies something about meaningness, and fixates something else. Stances allied with eternalism deny the nebulosity of a dimension of meaningness, and fixate a pattern. Stances allied with nihilism deny the pattern and fixate the dimension’s non-existence.

Recognizing how nebulosity and pattern work together moves one into the complete stance for that dimension.

Pattern of thinking

When you adopt a stance, a characteristic texture of thinking, feeling, and perhaps acting comes with it. The stance makes that way of being seem sensible. Also, that way of being makes the stance seem sensible.

For example, nihilism usually makes you depressed. Likewise, when you are depressed for other reasons, nihilism may seem obviously right.

Sales pitch and emotional appeal

The “sales pitch” is a slogan that encapsulates the language used to promote the stance.

A confused stance’s emotional appeal is the reason it is attractive. Each confused stance plays to some need for security, excitement, or self-aggrandizement.

Noticing that you are getting sucked in by the emotional promise made by a confused stance, and knowing that it cannot deliver on them, helps free you from it.

The complete stances are, unfortunately, less emotionally appealing. (Otherwise, we’d adopt them easily.) However, they are more realistic.

How a confused stance causes suffering

Confused stances distort experience by fixating and denying particular sorts of meaningness. When these mistaken perceptions collide with reality, emotional pain results.

Each confused stance produces a characteristic pattern of misunderstanding and misery.

Obstacles to maintaining a stance

The confused stances constantly collide with reality. It is impossible not to see this, and impossible not to suffer the consequences. This makes it impossible to remain consistently in a confused stance; they are always unstable.

A confused stance’s patterns of collision with reality—the obstacles to maintaining it—are resources for switching into a complete stance.

Unfortunately there are obstacles to adopting the complete stances, as well. Generally, complete stances are conceptually obscure, and appear emotionally unsatisfying.

Likely next stances

Because stances are unstable, we frequently stumble from one to another, without being clearly aware that we are doing this. In fact, all of the confused stances described in this book will be thoroughly familiar to every reader.

When a particular obstacle to maintaining one stance arises, there are typical routes into likely next stances. Knowing this, one can recognize an upcoming transition into a confused stance, and re-direct oneself into a complete stance instead.

Antidotes and counter-thoughts

These are ways of getting yourself out of a confused stance.

Simply recognizing that you are caught in one, and remembering that there is a better alternative, is often most of the battle.

Beyond that, one can notice particular confused patterns, and cut through them with specific counter-thoughts.1 Counter-thoughts can work in two ways. Some move from a confused stance to the complete stance. Others destabilize the confused stance, to make it less attractive so that you are more likely to jump to the complete stance spontaneously. (In those cases, though, one needs to guard against simply moving to a different confused stance.)

Intelligent features of a confused stance

Each confused stance is intelligent in some way. If it did not have a powerful logic to it, an almost-truth, we would not get stuck in it. Each approximates a complete stance, which is actually correct.

Noticing how the confused stance you have adopted is nearly right is helpful in several ways:

• It avoids “I’m a bad person because I fell into a confused stance again,” which is discouraging, and more likely to make you abandon the practice than to continue.
• It lets you see why you’ve adopted it.
• It helps point the way to a complete stance that shares the same accurate insight.
• It is the basis for appropriation—the use of a confused stance to communicate the corresponding complete stance.

• 1. This is similar to “cognitive shifting,” a psychotherapeutic approach. Apparently its development was influenced by Eastern religion—as Meaningness also was.

A stance is a basic attitude toward meaningness. A stance is a tool for understanding, from which you may act. This pages defines a series of terms that describe ways you can take up such a tool.

Adopting

To adopt a stance is to use it, at a particular moment, as a way of addressing a problem of meaningness.

For example, to adopt the stance of materialism means to think about purpose in terms of “mundane” or personal benefit.

As I explained earlier, stances are unstable. Frequently one adopts a stance only for a few seconds or minutes, before abandoning it for another one.

Mostly, people are not aware of the stances they adopt.

Committing (and rejecting)

To commit to a stance means to decide to adopt it consistently in the future. For example, you might resolve always to adopt mission as an approach to purpose, rather than materialism.

The various stances that concern a particular dimension of meaningness contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. Committing to one implies rejecting the others. For example, committing to thinking of yourself as ordinary implies rejecting the stances of specialness and nobility.

Commitment via systems

Although people actually think about meaningness in terms of stances, mostly they think they think about meaningness in terms of “systems.” Systems include religions, philosophies, ideologies, spiritual and psychological frameworks, and so forth.

Because people are mostly not aware of stances, it is somewhat unusual to commit to a stance directly. Instead, people commit to systems, which in turn demand certain stances.

An obvious example: most Western religions require the stance of eternalism. To be a good Christian, you are supposed to adopt eternalism whenever questions of meaningness arise.

Two more examples: some psychological ideologies require the stance of true self; some political ideologies require the stance of romantic rebellion.

Accomplishing

To accomplish a stance means that you actually do consistently adopt it, every time its dimension of meaningness becomes an issue. For example, accomplishing nihilism would mean that you always regard everything as meaningless.

Accomplishing a stance is difficult. Obvious, everyday evidence constantly contradicts all the confused stances. The complete stances are subtle and emotionally unsatisfactory.

In most cases, I think accomplishment is impossible in practice. Human beings are not actually put together in a way that makes it possible to see everything as meaningless. (Or as meaningful, as would be required to accomplish eternalism.)

Wavering

If you have committed to a stance, and have not accomplished it, you must apply effort to adopt it in cases in which it doesn’t seem to fit; and you often fail. I call this wavering.

Wavering causes emotional and cognitive problems. I explain what these problems are, for each specific stance, in the main part of this book.

These problems can be overcome. For confused stances, I show how to recognize them, and how to use them as a spur to adopting the corresponding complete stance instead. For complete stances, I show how to resolve the difficulties.

Appropriating

Each confused stance, although mistaken and usually damaging when adopted, is based on a valuable insight. (Otherwise, it would not be attractive at all.)

For example, monism, the idea that “all is One,” is based on the accurate insight that we are not isolated individuals, that there is no hard boundary between self and other, and that things are connected in innumerable ways, many of which we cannot know.

When one adopts a complete stance, the intelligent aspects of confused stances can be appropriated as tools. A complete stance is “complete” in that it incorporates the intelligent parts of the opposed confused stances for that dimension of meaningness. From the standpoint of the complete stance, the confused stances (which everyone understands) can be used to communicate the complete insight, and to draw others to it.

For example, although it is not true that “all is One,” the language of monism may be useful in explaining that things are non-separate—which is true.

This is the main division of the book Meaningness. After a couple of introductory pages, each of its chapters discusses one dimension of meaningness, and the stances we take to that dimension.

It discusses both confused stances—dysfunctional, incorrect ways of relating to meaning—and the functional, accurate complete stances. For each confused stance, it suggests antidotes, and ways to shift to the complete stance for its dimension.

Complex ideologies are based on collections of simple stances: fundamental attitudes toward meaningness. Some stances (addressing different dimensions of meaningness) work together well; others clash. Most systems align with one of three common combinations.

These combinations are:

• Dualist eternalism: everything is given a definite meaning by something separate from you. Christianity and Islam are based on this combination; God is what gives everything meaning.
• Monist eternalism: you, God, and the universe are a single thing, which is definitely meaningful. Advaita Hinduism is monist and eternalist, as is much current pop spirituality.
• Dualist nihilism: we are isolated individuals, wandering in a meaningless universe. Existentialism, postmodernism, and scientism tend to dualist nihilism.

Each of the three primary combinations typically comes with a corresponding collection of secondary stances; I’ll get to that in a minute.

The apparent lack of alternatives

Regarding the fundamental questions of meaning—does it exist, and where does it come from?—these three are the only well-known possibilities. I think all three are wrong; this book advocates a fourth combination of stances (about which I’ll say something at the end of this page).

Each of the Big Three has serious, obvious defects. However, people often commit to one of them primarily because it looks less bad than the other two.

Understanding this, you can see that much of the rhetoric supporting systems boils down to “less bad”:

• “God must exist, because otherwise there is no purpose in living, and you have no way of telling right from wrong.”
• “A God who is someone somewhere else cannot end your alienation from other beings. Enlightenment is possible only here, now. Only by being God can you overcome the isolation and limitations of material embodiment.”
• “You have to admit that everything is meaningless, because we know God is a fairy tale.”

No monist nihilism

Considering the two primary axes eternalism/nihilism and monism/dualism, there is a fourth possibility: monist nihilism. That is the view that “all is One, and it is meaningless.” Although this is conceptually coherent, it has few (if any) advocates. Apparently it is not emotionally attractive in the way the other combinations are.1

So, in practice, monism always implies eternalism, and nihilism always implies dualism. In the rest of this book, I’ll often speak simply of “monism” or “nihilism,” and you can take the eternalism and dualism for granted.

Other stances in the Big Three combinations

In addition to the four stances to fundamental questions of meaningness, there are stances to more specific dimensions such as purpose, ethics, and the nature of the self. These are commonly folded in with the Big Three combinations when people build ideological systems.

In some cases, the choices are forced. If you think nothing is meaningful (nihilism) then you have to accept that can be no ethics (ethical nihilism).

More often, the choices of stance toward specific dimensions of meaningness are logically independent. For example, both reasonable respectability and romantic rebellion are logically consistent with eternalism.

However, each of the Big Three has a typical emotional texture, which may be more or less compatible with other stances. Dualist eternalism generally combines with reasonable respectability, not romantic rebellion; that is far more likely to go along with nihilism. Dualist eternalism has meaning coming from some Cosmic Plan, and you had better obey what it says.

Most (if not all) systems are somewhat incoherent, and one system may take opposing stances to different specific cases. The psychological instability of stances reinforces this.

Dualist eternalism: typical combinations

The typical2 emotional texture of dualist eternalism is self-righteousness. You are validated by the eternal ordering principle.

Typically, dualist eternalism combines with:

• Mission: your purpose is to carry out the Cosmic Plan.
• Ethical eternalism: the eternal ordering principle says what is right and wrong.
• Reasonable respectability: society is a reflection of the Cosmic Plan, and you should obey authority.
• Religiosity: the eternal ordering principle says what is sacred and what is profane.
• Causality: everything happens for the best, in accord with the Cosmic Plan. (Except free will lets us do evil.)

Nihilism: typical combinations

The typical emotional texture of nihilism is defiant negativity. It sucks that the universe is meaningless, but you hate (and want to shout down) eternalists who proclaim the lie of meaningfulness.

Typically, nihilism combines with:

• Materialism: since there is no real purpose to life, you might as well get stuff you want.
• Ethical nihilism: ethics are as meaningless as everything else.
• Romantic rebellion: society is an oppressive, meaningless fiction.
• Secularism: nothing is sacred.
• Chaos: the universe is random; nothing happens for any particular reason.

Monism: typical combinations

The typical emotional texture of monism is smug stupidity. Convinced you are God, you believe you understand everything effortlessly, so you don’t need to try to figure anything out.

Typically, monism combines with:

• Mission: your purpose is to realize your Godhood, and then help others realize theirs.
• True self: your essential nature is indivisible from God.
• Total responsibility: as God, you create the entire universe.
• Specialness: as God, you are the only valuable thing in existence.
• Causality: everything that occurs is your own doing.

Complete stances align with each other

This book advocates a fourth combination of stances: the ones I describe as complete.

Its typical emotional texture is appreciative curiosity.

Here’s how some complete stances align:

• Meaningness: things may be meaningful, meaningless, or may be ambiguously between. It’s worth investigating meanings, but you can’t always expect answers.
• Participation: there is no one right way of drawing boundaries; things can be connected in many different ways, and can also have no significant connection. Finding unexpected connections and redrawing boundaries is often valuable; so is recognizing irrelevance.
• Intermittently continuing: selfness is valuable and should not be rejected; it can usefully be explored, but it has no essential nature.
• Enjoyable usefulness: purposes are co-created in an appreciative, compassionate dance with the world.
• Ethical responsiveness: ethics are not a matter of personal or cultural choice, but are fluid and have no definite source.

• 1. You might enjoy working out some consequences of monist nihilism. If you are a philosophy geek, you might also wonder whether there are any historical figures who fit the category.
• 2. These textures are tendencies, not absolutes. Some committed dualist eternalists are free from self-righteousness, for instance.

This book is based on the idea that meaning can be real but nebulous: ambiguous, variable, and context-dependent. This is an uncommon stance.

The more common stances are eternalism (that meanings are fixed and well-defined); and nihilism (that meaning is entirely non-existent). This chapter explains the psychological dynamics of these confused stances in detail.

The mistaken assumption shared by eternalism and nihilism is that meaning must be objective to be real. Existentialism took an alternative stance, that meanings are subjective and personal. This chapter begins to explain why that is also a mistake. A detailed account must be postponed into the next chapter, which investigates issues of the inside/outside boundary, mind and world, self and other. The view of Meaningness is that all these distinctions are nebulous, and that meaning is neither subjective nor objective. Instead, it is an interaction that crosses all these boundaries.

This chapter also begins to explain the complete stance, which allows for nebulous meaning. It only makes a beginning, because the nebulosity of meaning involves concepts that I can introduce only gradually. Understanding of the nature of meaning will, I hope, accumulate throughout your reading of the book. Ultimately, meaningness is itself a nebulous concept, and cannot be specified with complete precision.

Two years ago, well into a mainly happy marriage, you began a secret affair.

The attraction was overwhelming. The sex was scalding. You loved with a passion you had never felt before.

Your lover—also married—understood parts of you that your spouse did not. You were able to be a different person. You explored aspects of your personality that you had never been able to express before. You made different sorts of jokes. You went on adventurous dates, trying things your spouse—who you knew was sweet but a bit dull when you got married—would never have agreed to do.

After a year and a bit, the passion waned. Your secret meetings began to feel slightly repetitive. You found that your personalities would not be compatible in the long term. You wanted quite different things out of life.

It began to seem you were going through the motions. You had one meaningless fight about nothing. Then you discussed the future, and agreed to end the affair on good terms.

Now, you wonder: what did that mean?

Where did the meaning go?

In the beginning, the affair seemed enormously significant. By the end, it had slid into a casual friendship plus sex.

Were you wrong to think it was meaningful at the start? Was it always meaningless? Or did it have a meaning that it lost?

Perhaps the original meaning lives on in memory, and in the changes in you? You know that the effects of the affair will reverberate for years to come. But what meaning will it have in ten, twenty, thirty years, when life has moved on to other dramas? What could it mean after everyone involved is dead?

How could meaningfulness come and go? To be more than just an opinion, or a feeling, shouldn’t meanings stay the same eternally?

The ethical dimension

“Eternal” reminds you uncomfortably that, of course, there is an ethical dimension to adultery. From the beginning, and all through the affair, you could not ignore that.

You grew up Christian, and you know that any pastor would say that adultery is always wrong. But you left the Church in your teens, when you decided you had to say what was right and wrong in the Bible, not the other way around.

You also have friends who say a married affair is definitely OK—so long as some conditions are met.

But you yourself find it hard to decide whether this one was right, or wrong, or perhaps somehow somewhere in-between.

It was mostly a remarkable and enjoyable experience (with some slightly yuck moments toward the end). If it were not for the ethical concerns, you certainly wouldn’t regret it.

More importantly, you think, its lasting consequences were mainly good. Your lover was quite different in bed from anyone you had been with, and you learned to be more open when making love yourself. That has improved sex in your marriage; your spouse is happy about that.

On the other hand, if you had been caught, it would have hurt several people besides you. Putting innocents at risk must be part of the moral equation.

And there is another lasting effect. You aren’t sure if it is good or bad. Your affair confirmed that something important is missing in your marriage—something you will never get from your spouse. Before, you suspected; now you know. Now, you cannot un-know that.

That is bad for the marriage; but maybe it is good for you. Maybe even for your spouse, in the long run.

You cannot help wondering about other possibilities. Is it realistic to want lasting passion and compatibility?

You do not want to become a serial adulterer in an attempt to find out.

Ethics: what are they good for?

You are introduced to a rather odd woman at a cocktail party. She is deathly pale, with a black leather miniskirt and extensive, spiky tattoos. She sounds normal enough, though, and explains that she teaches philosophy at a local university.

“Oh? That’s interesting,” you say. “What kind of philosophy?”

“Well, um, ethics, actually.”

“Ah,” you say. “Um—I wonder if I could ask you a professional question?”

“Well, if you want personal advice—” she begins, frowning.

“No, sorry! Not like that. You see, I got really interested in ethics recently. I kind of geeked out on it, actually. I read a bunch on the web, and then a couple books. So I learned all about virtue ethics and deontology and consequentialism and stuff. But what I don’t understand is how you would use all that to figure out what to do in a real-life ethical quandary. It seems awfully abstract.”

“Oh dear,” she says, grinning. “You have discovered our dirty little secret.”

“What?”

“Well, you know, most ethicists have the same problem. Our professional work usually isn’t much help when ethical push comes to practical shove.”

“Oh,” you say.

“How does that make you feel?”

You call your friend Susie. After some small talk, you come around to the point. “Susie—I’m not sure how to ask this, but—you remember you told me once about a therapist who was helpful to you?”

She laughs. “Yes, of course. After my first was born—”

“Sam,” you remember.

“Right, Sam. Can you believe he’s in second grade now? Anyway, I had post-partum depression, and Janet was really helpful. Are you OK? Do you want me to give you her number?”

“Yeah, I’m OK, I think. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with me—”

“You don’t have to be crazy to see a therapist, you know!”

“Yeah, I know. But what I remember is your saying that everything seemed meaningless. And—”

“I had all these expectations about what being a mother would be like. And the reality wasn’t anything like that. She helped me figure out how I felt about that.”

“Right, so I’m kind of wondering what something in my life means, I mean meant, so I thought—”

“Sure, of course. Hang on and I’ll look her up. If I can just figure out how this damn phone works…”

Talking with the therapist doesn’t go as smoothly.

“How does that make you feel?” is her mantra. After answering that dozens of times, over several sessions, you finally rebel. “I know how it makes me feel. What I want to know is what it means.”

“Well, what does it mean to you?” she asks.

“But that’s just it,” you say. “I want to know what it actually means. Not just to me. I mean, meaning isn’t just a feeling. Ethics can’t be like that. Some things are just right or wrong, no matter what you feel about them.”

“That seems like quite a polarizing view,” the therapist says. “Maybe things aren’t so black and white… I see our hour is almost up. Next time, perhaps it would be helpful for you to tell me about your parent’s marriage.”

You decide there won’t be a next time.

Meaningness is not mostly ethics

Ethics, you realize, couldn’t answer the question “what did that mean?” anyway. Even if you could be sure whether the affair was right or wrong, the one word “right” or “wrong” would hardly begin to express the meaning of the relationship. Even an explanation of why it was right or wrong would still ignore most of what seemed to matter about it.

The meaning of the affair seems to have many dimensions besides ethics. Yet you find it hard to say what those would be.

Certainly, how you feel about it is another dimension. And how your former lover feels too.

But what it says about you seems more important. You didn’t think you were the sort of person who would cheat—and you still don’t. But apparently you are—because you did.

What else does that imply about you? Are you less trust-worthy than you thought, in other ways?

You felt, in the initial rush, that you had no choice. You tried as hard as you could, you thought, to resist your feelings, and failed. Could you have done differently? Is it just sleazy self-justification to say that you would have had to have been a different person to have chosen differently—and that it is not possible to be anyone other than you are?

But now, in fact, you are not the same person you were. The affair changed you; and that is another dimension of its meaning. Your risk-loving lover gave you a confidence you did not have before. And the affair exposed parts of yourself you were only vaguely aware of. Now those often come into play as you think and feel and relate.

Beyond all that, you suspect there are dimensions of meaning that transcend the personal; that go beyond the effects on anyone involved.

Marriage is a sacrament, according to the Church. It is a contract with God as well as another person. You don’t exactly believe in God any more… but marriage doesn’t seem to just be an agreement between two people, either. Maybe it is society, not God, to whom you are responsible? Marriage is a foundation of society. But whose business is it what you do, if it has no consequences for them?

Besides which, the affair itself seemed at first to have a sacred dimension. Sometimes, making love, the sense that you were separate people dropped away. There was simply intense sensation and exquisite action—with no one there to feel or act. And then sometimes it seemed that it was the entire universe making love. Awareness extended into infinity, and there was the presence of the God you don’t believe in.

But surely that was an illusion. This is just self-justification, isn’t it? It makes no sense at all to talk of self-indulgent pleasure as sacred.

A life lesson

During the affair, you told no one. It was a private thing, just for you and your lover. But now, needing perspective, you confide in two close friends.

Over lunch, you tell Chris the short version. You want to be clear that you are not looking for sympathy or support or advice. You need help figuring out what it meant.

“It’s a life lesson,” says Chris. “The universe always sends you the exact experiences you need to develop your true self. It’s the way you find out what you were really meant to do.”

“But what’s the lesson, then?” you ask. “What am I supposed to do?”

“That’s up to you,” says Chris. “You are totally responsible for your own reality, you know. But you have to use your intuition. I think you think too much, sometimes. I mean, really, reading philosophy books is not going to help you find the meaning of an affair! If you go deeply into your feelings, you will find the answer. Maybe that’s the lesson, in itself!”

Lunch ends a little awkwardly. Chris has fit your experience to a generic spiritual story. Nothing in it takes account of any of the details, of the complex texture of your relationships and your life. What you want to know about is the meaning of your affair, not about meaning in general. You are a bit annoyed that Chris doesn’t understand, or is ignoring what you care about; and you can’t completely hide it. Chris always was a bit of an airhead, you think. In retrospect, not the right person to consult.

You are aware that Chris, in turn, is a bit annoyed, because you are dismissing valuable spiritual insight. You seem excessively skeptical, materialistic, and self-involved.

There is an unspoken agreement: “we won’t talk about this again—and we’ll avoid other topics that would expose our different takes on life.”

Life is for living

You meet Kim for drinks after work. Kim is sensible, and you know won’t get mystical on you.

At first, the discussion seems to go well. Unlike Chris, Kim wants to know about the details. Exactly what was so great about the sex? Where did you go on dates? How did you keep the secret?

After an hour, you start again to be a bit frustrated. What you want to know is what it meant. The details matter—but not every detail matters. It would take a year to tell the total story of a year-long affair; and then what? The story itself is not what matters; it is what it means.

“Why does it have to ‘mean’ something?” asks Kim. “Why can’t you just let it be what it was?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” you say. “What was it?”

“It’s just life,” says Kim. “Life is for living, I guess.”

“What does that mean?” you ask. “That’s what I want to know—how should I live life?”

“You mean, like, is it wrong to have an affair?” asks Kim.

“Well, that’s part of it,” you say.

“Geez, I don’t know,” says Kim. “I guess you only get one life, and the point is to enjoy it. So you have to look out for yourself, and get what you want, some of the time. And, of course, you have to have some kind of ethics. But no harm, no fault. Anyway, it’s over now—why worry about it?”

You nod agreement, but silently you think: That seems too easy.

“So when you did it in the stairwell at Chez Jean’s, were you, like, standing against the wall, or lying down on the landing, or what?” asks Kim.

What kind of world is this?

Neither of your friends’ views was helpful. Chris has a big-picture theory of meaning, which probably came out of some self-help book, but it doesn’t seem to explain anything about your affair. Kim isn’t interested in any meaning beyond the mundane and obvious.

Neither view seems exactly wrong, but both seem to miss what is important. You wonder if somehow they could be combined. Is there a way to understand meaning that takes account of both the big picture and the details?

To be useful, a big picture story has to help make sense of specifics. But, it occurs to you, the meaning of the specifics says a lot about what the big picture has to be.

The world is a very different place depending on whether your affair was definitely wrong (or right), or if that is just a personal opinion—or a cultural agreement.

The world is a very different place depending on whether “the universe” sends you ideal life lessons, or “the universe” is some rocks and gas scattered through vast empty space.

The world is a very different place depending on whether you could have chosen not to begin the affair, or if (being who you are) you could not have acted differently.

The world is a very different place depending on whether somehow the meaning of the affair could become perfectly clear—or if it was inherently nebulous.

Some things are meaningful; some are meaningless. Some are vaguely in-between.

This is our constant, natural experience in everyday life. It is only in religion, spirituality, and philosophy that people insist that everything is meaningful, or that nothing is.

Insisting that everything is meaningful is eternalism. Insisting that nothing is meaningful is nihilism.

Eternalism and nihilism are the simplest confused stances. Understanding what is wrong with them, and how the complete stance avoids their confusion, is key to the rest of this book.

Everyday examples

Some experiences are pretty much meaningless. This is true even when they have a positive or negative effect on you.

Your usual bus left two minutes late; the Coke machine mistakenly gave you an extra coin in change; you spilled some of it on your shirt.

So what? Such things just happen. They don’t happen for any particular reason; they’re effectively random. They don’t have any implications beyond their immediate, small effect on you. They don’t tell you anything about yourself or about the universe, beyond the obvious.

You go for a hike alone in the desert, and your arm gets trapped between two rocks. You cannot free it, and after waiting several days for an improbable rescue, you realize you have the choice of cutting off your own arm with a dull knife, or dying of thirst.

Although an accident, this is a meaningful choice. If you survive, you will remember it as a meaningful experience. Though it was an entirely personal adventure, with no direct effect on anyone else, millions of other people are likely to find it meaningful as well.

We speak of “major life events”—marriage; giving birth; death of parent, child, or spouse; life-threatening illness; financial triumph or catastrophe. These are experiences most people would agree were highly meaningful.

So what?

Some things are more meaningful than others, evidently. You might say that meaningfulness and meaninglessness are a matter of degree, not either/or.

That’s not quite right, either, though. In many cases, it is difficult to say how meaningful an event was. This might not be a problem with knowing how meaningful it was, but an inherent nebulosity of the situation itself.

None of this is mysterious, or should be controversial. In fact, in ordinary circumstances, probably everyone would agree.

Still, there are situations that make it tempting to say that everything is meaningful, or that nothing is. These situations give rise to eternalism and nihilism. The rest of this chapter explains why these temptations arise, why we should resist them, and how.

Why would anyone want to claim that everything is meaningful, or that everything is meaningless, defying our everyday experience that some things are meaningful and some not?

Here I’ll give an example of extreme meaninglessness, and one of extreme meaningfulness. Because it is difficult to deny their meaninglessness and meaningfulness, these help uncover the reasons people might want to do that.

Fear of meaninglessness motivates eternalism

A tiny gray pebble slides half an inch down a slope on a lifeless planet a million light-years from the nearest star. No being ever knows about this, and nothing happens as a result of it.

If anything is meaningless, this is it. So why on earth would you claim this must be meaningful? Only if it is important that absolutely everything is meaningful. And why would that be?

This insistence is motivated by fear: the fear that perhaps everything is meaningless.

If we could definitely say which things are meaningful and which are meaningless, there would be no problem. The meaninglessness of the pebble’s slide would not threaten the meaningfulness of our own lives.

But we cannot always say what has meaning and what does not. We have no hard-line test. Meaningfulness is frustratingly unreliable; transient, uncertain.

There are clues. In everyday experience, it seems that things are meaningful only if they are meaningful to someone. And, mostly things are meaningful only if they have some effect, positive or negative, on someone. The pebble’s slide is meaningless because it fails those tests.

But what about your own life? Things happen that seem meaningful to you. But often they do not seem meaningful to other people—especially if they affect only you. And it is certainly possible to be mistaken about meaningfulness—to suppose things have meanings that they don’t. So isn’t it possible that you are entirely mistaken about meaningfulness? Isn’t it possible that life itself is completely meaningless? That is a profoundly depressing idea.

“Nonsense,” you think. “I know that my life is meaningful to me.” But what good is that? No one else cares about your life the way you do. Maybe your supposed “meaningfulness” is a delusion. Maybe it is purely subjective, and exists only in your own mind. And then, so what? That seems like a meaningless kind of “meaning.”

This is a slippery slope you don’t want to slide down. Since there seem to be no definite criteria for meaningfulness, you cannot rely on anything to have meaning. There is no solid ground under foot, once you admit the nebulosity of meaningness.

Better to stick a stake in the ground at the top of the hill. If everything is meaningful, then there is no need to sort out what is or isn’t. There is no need to grapple with ambiguity and uncertainty. There is a reliable foundation on which you can build a meaningful life.

This is the stance of eternalism. Eternalism provides a reassuring firmness, certainty, definiteness to meaning. It says: you are right to care about what you do, because it is truly meaningful.

But what makes everything meaningful? What could give meaning to the pebble?

Here, you must invoke a Cosmic Plan. There has to be a universe-spanning intelligence that knows everything, and that gives everything meaning. (What meaning? That is not always for humans to know.)

The supposed meaningfulness of the pebble and the Cosmic Plan are mutually reinforcing. The pebble couldn’t be meaningful without the Cosmic Plan. If seemingly meaningless things were not really meaningful, the Cosmic Plan would have no work to do, and we would have no reason to imagine it.

Since usually things are meaningful only to someone, who likes or dislikes them, you might personalize the Cosmic Plan. God is the “someone” to whom all things are meaningful, and whose preferences gives positive or negative value to all things.

Fear of excessive meaning motivates nihilism

A gigantic spaceship arrives. Astonishingly beautiful aliens emerge, and announce that they are on a diplomatic mission from the Universal Federation of a billion planets.

Humankind, they explain, has reached the point of sophistication where we can join the Federation. We will not, however, join as junior partners. Human beings have a unique spiritual ability not found anywhere else in the universe. This ability is latent in us now, but can easily be developed with tools the aliens will provide.

Unfortunately, the entire universe, with its billions of inhabited planets, will be destroyed just a few years from now. A tiny flaw in the fabric of reality is about to spread across the universe in an instant, like a pin-prick in a balloon, and the whole of space-time will evaporate.

Only the specially-developed spiritual abilities of human beings can prevent this.

The aliens will make us immortal and vastly more intelligent than any human has ever been—a necessary prerequisite to this spiritual development. Naturally, this will make us radically different from the way we were; we will no longer be human.

Having saved the universe, humanity will lead all other intelligent species to a triumphant destiny, a culmination of the ultimate purpose of existence that is now utterly inconceivable.

However, since the aliens do not wish to force anyone to do anything, it is up to us to decide whether to undergo the transformation.

This is a meaningful choice. The fate of the universe, and billions of billions of beings, hangs in the balance.

Suddenly, your nagging back ache, your promotion review at work, and the credit card company’s screw-up that is causing all kinds of havoc—all highly meaningful yesterday—seem totally meaningless. Political parties, religious differences, wars, economics, favorite songs—even these become meaningless by comparison.

The only way to say “this choice would not really be meaningful” is to insist that, no matter how many beings are affected, the apparent meaning is still just subjective. It’s only in the minds of a bunch of random life-forms, who are (after all) just blobs of matter; swirls of subatomic particles. Therefore, it is illusory.

Implicit here again is the view that real meaningfulness could only be objective, and could only be provided by something external to the universe. There is no Cosmic Plan, so nothing is truly meaningful.

This is the stance of nihilism. Nihilism’s improbable insistence on meaninglessness is also motivated by fear. It is the mirror-image fear of eternalism.

The fear is that, if you admit anything is meaningful, then perhaps everything has a fixed meaning—or at least everything in your life.

You don’t want the responsibility of dealing with the intricacies, implications, and imperatives of all that meaningfulness. And if everything had a specific meaning, there would be no room for creativity. You would have no freedom.

Perhaps worst of all, you might have to accept a lot of sentimental claptrap—the nonsense eternalists spout in a desperate attempt to justify their delusions.

Meaningness without a Cosmic Plan

Eternalism and nihilism exist only out of fear of each other. There is a better alternative—what I call the complete stance.

I suggest that meaningfulness is not provided by a Cosmic Plan. There is no Cosmic Plan; but that does not mean that nothing is meaningful.

I suggest that some things are meaningful, and some things are not. That is true even though we have no definite criteria to decide which is which.

I suggest that meaningness is neither objective, nor subjective.

Accepting these suggestions allows you to let go of the unrealistic fears that motivate both eternalism and nihilism.

This complete view of meaningness has its own implications. They may seem to make life more complicated. However, the complete stance also eliminates the many troubles eternalism and nihilism cause.

This far into the book, you may be impatient. I’ve said a lot about how meaningness doesn’t work. But how does it work? I have said almost nothing, other than that it is nebulous. How unsatisfactory!

I would love to tell you exactly what meaning is. I’d love to explain Life, The Universe, and Everything in a way that solves all your problems.

Unfortunately, I can’t—and neither can anyone else. That sucks; but this is the actual situation we are in.

We have a choice of explanations of meaningness: ones that are simple, clear, harmful, and wrong; or ones that are complex, vague, helpful, and approximately right. I prefer the latter.

It seems to me that:

• No one can say quite how meaning works.
• Theories that pretend to explain are either eternalist or nihilist, and both are wrong and harmful.1
• We aren’t likely to get a full explanation any time soon.
• We can’t wait for a perfect understanding of meaning, because we have to live life now.
• So we have to accept that our understanding is incomplete, and do the best we can. Life is fired at us point-blank;2 issues of ethics and purpose won’t wait for someone to find a perfect theory.
• We can form a partial understanding of meaningness. We are not entirely ignorant, and vague understanding is better than none.
• Incomplete understanding is not a huge obstacle to sensible action—which is another reason waiting for a perfect theory would be senseless.

This book will, eventually, say a lot about how meaningness works. Some of that will be intuitive and impressionistic. I hope understanding will accumulate as you read brief partial explanations, and examples in passing.

Some other discussions will be quite technical; perhaps most readers will want to skip over those. In any case, I am postponing most into the chapter on monism and dualism, which develops some necessary concepts.

But here’s a preview.

The natural human view is that meanings are inherent in external things. Thunder means the gods are angry, and that’s a fact about thunder and gods, not about people. So on this view, meanings are objective: external to us. They are the same for everyone.

When “same for everyone” ran into differences of opinion, monotheism moved all meanings into God instead. God gives everything ultimate meanings, that no one may disagree with. God is external, so monotheistic meaning is also objective.

Then God died, and the world was disenchanted, so objects all became inherently meaningless dead matter. That meant meanings can’t be objective. The obvious alternative—developed in the 1700s—was that meanings are subjective. They live in the minds of individual people.

250 years later, versions of this idea are still taken for granted by most sophisticated people. Unfortunately, the subjective theory of meaning doesn’t work. It verges on nihilism—outright denial of all meaning. Fortunately, the theory is also not true.

When you are hungry, the meaning of food is not subjective. You, personally, are hungry, but the meaning is shared with everyone else (and probably all other vertebrate animals). It’s not particularly “mental”; it’s as much in your sensory organs, and digestive system, as in your brain. And it’s in the actions of your hands and mouth as you eat.

The meaning of a handshake is partly arbitrary, but it is not subjective. You can’t redefine it to make it mean what you want. When you shake hands, the meaning depends on a huge amount of cultural background, involving millions of people. It probably also depends on evolved biological functions we don’t know much about.

The subjective theory of meaning is not full-blown nihilism, but tends to slide into it. That’s because we actually can’t mean anything much by ourselves; meaning is mostly a social and cultural activity. Narrowing one’s focus to supposedly personal meanings leads to social and cultural alienation, and then to nihilistic depression.

A meaning is neither subjective nor objective; it is not inside your mind, nor outside. It requires both subjects and objects, and it doesn’t dwell in either. It takes time and space, but it is not precisely located.

Especially, a meaning does not live in your brain. That popular pseudoscientific idea is the “representational theory of mind.” It is internally contradictory and unworkable. Meaning may require a brain, but usually many brains, and also non-brain stuff.

Meaningness is a dynamic, interactive process. Any particular meaning involves a complicated history of many creatures and things; a network of involvement that we only ever partly understand.

A meaning always appears nebulous to us, because we never know everything about it. This is, in philosophical terms, a epistemological fact: about us. I believe that meanings are also actually nebulous. That is an ontological theory, about meaningness. I’ll discuss this technically, later in the book. However, epistemological nebulosity is enough for practical purposes.

We have to live as if meaningness is nebulous, whether it ultimately is or not. This book is about how.

• 1. Eternalist theories pretend to have detailed understandings that are, in fact, mistaken. Acting on these wrong understandings has bad results—as you’d expect. Nihilist theories suggest that, since full understanding is impossible, we should pretend that everything is meaningless. That would allow us to evade responsibility for our lives; but we can’t actually get away with that, either.
• 2. “We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, ‘here and now,’ without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.” —Jose Ortega y Gasset

Stance	Eternalism	Nihilism	Meaning/ness
Summary	Everything is given a fixed meaning by an eternal ordering principle (Cosmic Plan)	Nothing is really meaningful	Meaning is nebulous, yet patterned; meaningfulness and meaninglessness intermingle
What it denies	Nebulosity; meaninglessness	Pattern; meaningfulness
What it fixates	Meaning	Meaninglessness
The sales pitch	You are guaranteed a good outcome if you follow the rules	You don’t have to care! Don’t get fooled again	Accurate understanding of meaningness allows both freedom and purpose
Emotional appeal	Certainty; understanding; control. Reassurance that if you act in accordance with Cosmic Plan, everything will be well.	Intelligence. Also, nothing means anything, so not getting what you want is not a problem.
Pattern of thinking	Deliberate stupidity; sentimentality; self-righteousness	Contempt; rage; intellectualization; depression; anxiety	Joyful realism
Likely next stances	Mission	Materialism
Accomplishment	Unify your self with Cosmic Plan	Total apathy	Wizardry
How it causes suffering	Action based on imagined meanings fails; narrowed scope for action; Cosmic Plan makes insane, harmful demands	Have to blind self to meaningfulness; undermines any practical action
Obstacles to maintaining the stance	Difficulty of blinding oneself to manifestations of nebulosity, and submitting to Cosmic Plan	Difficulty of blinding self to manifestations of pattern, and abandoning all desires	Unappealing due to complexity and uncertainty
Antidotes; counter-thoughts	Curiosity; realism; intelligence; enjoyment of nebulosity, meaninglessness, un-knowing	Enjoyment of pattern; recovery of passion
Intelligent aspect	There is meaning, and it is not merely subjective, so nihilism is wrong	There are no inherent, objective, or eternal meanings, so eternalism is wrong
Positive appropriation after resolution	Respect for pattern is a compassionate aspect of realism	Recognition of nebulosity is a wisdom aspect of nihilism; nearly-correct understanding of defects of eternalism

Eternalism is the stance that everything has a fixed, clear-cut meaning. That’s an attractive fantasy, but it inevitably runs into the reality that meaningness is nebulous: variable, vague, and context-dependent. That collision can cause serious trouble.

This section provides tools for noticing when you have assumed the eternalist stance; for seeing how it is harmful; and for shifting into the complete stance instead.

If you haven’t already read “Preview: eternalism and nihilism” in the book’s introduction, you may want to do that first.

Eternalism is wrong and harmful, yet appealing

It’s obvious that many things are meaningless, and most meanings are somewhat vague. In other words, we all know that eternalism is wrong. We’re only tempted to adopt eternalism at times when meaninglessness or ambiguity is emotionally threatening. (See “Extreme examples” for a preview.)

Since it’s obviously wrong, I won’t argue against eternalism in detail. That would not be particularly helpful. We always already know it’s mistaken, and yet we fall into it anyway. (If you are committed to an eternalist system, I send good wishes, and suggest that you won’t find this book to your taste.)

Even if you specifically reject eternalism, you will find that you adopt it at times, unwittingly. (Or I do, anyway!) This is particularly true for those who waver in their relationship with eternalism. That includes agnostics, spiritual seekers, and miscellaneous “other”s who remain uncommitted to any stance.

Understanding why we are vulnerable to eternalism is the first step toward avoiding it. These emotional dynamics are independent of specific beliefs or commitments. I’ll start with a funny story about a time I got suckered by eternalism. Then I’ll explain more generally its emotional appeal.

Then I’ll point out ways it fails to deliver on its emotional promises, and causes harm and suffering. This can be hard to accept, because eternalism seems to offer hope, solace, purpose, ethical certainty, and all manner of other desirable meaning-goods. It promises control over your life—but cannot deliver. Seeing through this deceptive game lets you escape playing it.

Eternalism depends on a series of ploys to make it seem plausible. These are tricks we play on ourselves, and each other, to avoid seeing eternalism’s failures. I will explain how to recognize and disarm each of these tactics.

This is (mostly) not about religion

Religions—especially fundamentalist ones—are the most obvious forms of eternalism. However, eternalism is more basic than religion, or any other system. It’s not about specific beliefs; it is a fundamental attitude to meaningness. It can show up unaccompanied by any conceptual system. It can show up in non-ideological popular attitudes to meaning—for example, in idealized conceptions of romance, illustrated at the top of this page.

So, although parts of my discussion of eternalism may sound similar to familiar criticisms of religion, it applies to atheists, skeptics, and rationalists too. We are not immune. Dropping religious beliefs is only a first step towards freeing ourselves from eternalism.

Political ideologies—especially extremist ones—insist on fixed meanings. So do various other systems, including some brands of rationalism, psychotherapy, scientism, and so on. The final part of this chapter discusses these non-theistic forms of eternalism.

I’ll begin with a story about a time I fell under the spell of eternalism, with ridiculous results.

Then, I’ll draw some serious conclusions about the way eternalism works.

How I discovered The Ultimate Meaning Of Being

The point of gambling was lost on me.

I am not especially risk-averse. As a businessman, I often made decisions in which millions of dollars, and the survival of the enterprise, were at stake. Nowadays, I pursue outdoor sports in which death is a definite possibility.

On the other hand, I do not enjoy risk for its own sake. I see no point in taking risks unless the expected rewards are greater.

The puzzling thing about casino gambling is that it has “negative expected value.” Over time, gamblers almost always lose more money than they make. In fact, the modern conceptual framework for “rational action” was invented to explain why gambling is a bad idea. So what’s the point?

A decade ago, I started passing through Reno airport regularly, and sometimes spent the night in hotels there. They all have enormous casinos on the ground floor, laid out so that you cannot avoid walking past innumerable flashing, blooping slot machines on the way to your room.

Being curious about human motivations, I used to watch the gamblers, trying to figure out what they were feeling.

I had some guesses; but I thought I ought to try betting, to see if I could experience the same thing. My guess was that I couldn’t. It seemed likely that gamblers gambled because they were stupid, or did not understand negative expectation value, or had some sort of superstitious belief that they were special, so randomness did not apply. I couldn’t adopt their wrong beliefs, so I wouldn’t be able to have the experience they did.

I had also heard it said that you can only understand gambling by wagering a sum large enough that losing it would be a serious problem for you. I wanted to understand, but not that badly.

Applying rational decision theory, I resolved to obtain as much information as I could at the least possible expected cost. (That strategy is automatic for me.) I looked for the lowest-stakes slot machine, and found one that would let me bet a single cent on each round.

So I fed it a dollar—the least it would accept—and pulled the handle. I immediately won five cents. And ten cents on the next try! Then several losses in a row.

I upped my bet from one to five cents—and won again.

As I consistently won more than I lost, I was gradually suffused with a warm glow. I felt safe and at home in the world. What a blessed relief!

I realized that the universe loved me, and that everything was going to come out well after all. My ever-present nagging sense of vague wrongness disappeared, and I recognized that it had always been a misunderstanding. Everything is as it should be; everything is connected; everything makes sense; everything is benevolently watched over by the eternal ordering principle.

This was eternalism straight-up, purely at a bodily, felt level.

I’m disposed to nihilism; so, at the same time, I was running a sardonic mental commentary. The cognitive dissonance between feeling unquestioned confidence in the All-Good Cosmic Plan, and my intellectual confidence that casino operators ensure that their slot machines are a losing bet, was extremely funny. That humorousness fed back into my bodily enjoyment.

It didn’t take long to conclude that I had gained all the knowledge I had asked for, and far more. The universe, in its infinite generosity, had gifted me with profound insight. To finish the charade, I increased my bet to 25 cents, and then 50 cents.

I walked back toward my hotel room grinning like the village idiot, unspeakably happy.

As I entered the elevator, a sexy lady jumped in with me.

“Lucky night?” she asked.

(It dawned on me only as I was writing this that she was a professional. I’m kind of clueless about such things. A guy in a suit, leaving a casino floor accompanied only by a gigantic grin, is surely a fine business opportunity.)

“No!” I exclaimed, beaming. “At one point I was up by thirty-seven cents, but in the end I lost the whole dollar!”

Her face closed; she turned away, and wouldn’t look at me for the rest of the elevator ride.

There’s something wrong with anyone who’s that excited about thirty-seven cents.

Eternalism is an addiction

Actually, winning thirty-seven cents was not going to make a such a big difference in my life.

Discovering universal love would. That was a really great feeling. Experiencing that all the time—the way some mystics supposedly do—would be fabulous.

That sense of safety, understanding, and certainty could be addictive. I think that’s part of why we all frequently fall into the eternalist stance—even when we know better.

Eternalism feels right—absolutely right. And when we lose it, we’ll do almost anything to get it back. We’ll pretend not to see obvious randomness, and take up arms to destroy evidence of it.

Eternalism and patternicity

“Patternicity”1 is the brain’s built-in tendency to perceive patterns that don’t exist. An example is the experience of seeing a face in the light and dark patches on a rock, or splotch of paint, or piece of toast. It’s often impossible to not-see them, even when you are undeceived, and know perfectly well there’s no face there.

Eternalism is patternicity for broad dimensions of meaning—purpose, value, ethics—rather than physical objects. Our brains seem to have evolved to find patterns of meaning, too. In the casino, the intellectual understanding that my feelings were ridiculous did not make them any less profound. Runs of unexpected good or bad luck trigger the eternalist stance automatically.

Meaningness is not merely subjective

Some claim that meanings are merely subjective: matters of personal opinion, or at most cultural conventions. Unfortunately, this slides rapidly into nihilism. Fortunately, meanings are not merely subjective. I will explain both this in detail later in the book, but:

If meaningness was merely subjective, it would not be possible to be wrong about it. However, my felt beliefs about meaning, in the grip of a run of good luck, were definitely outright wrong.

Eternalism and dopamine

The joy of winning, patternicity, addiction, mania, and religion are all connected by the neurotransmitter dopamine.2 Dopamine plays a key role in motivation and reward. It spikes in response to unexpected success, and is experienced as pleasurable and energizing.

Dopamine reinforces your discovery of a valuable connection, with a new practical understanding of the world. It’s your brain telling you you finally got things right, for once—so pay attention, remember this, and do it again!

Random gambling wins are unexpected, and therefore cause dopamine release. Unfortunately, that increases patternicity, because the brain treats dopamine as evidence of insight. Gamblers typically believe in “luck” as something that comes and goes, and “streaks” of wins or losses that they can detect. When “on a winning streak,” they expect it to continue; but they also believe a losing streak must be balanced by future winnings. Either way, perceptions of non-existent patterns keep them playing.

Stimulant drugs, such as nicotine, cocaine, and speed, raise dopamine levels, mimicking the reward effect of unexpected success. Stimulant addiction and gambling addiction are, therefore, believed to work in much the same way.

Mania—the “up” phase of manic depression—is similar to an cocaine high, and may also be dopamine-mediated.3^,4

Hyper-religiosity is common in mania. The manic feels full of cosmic realization, spiritual vision, confidence, and charisma. Many religious leaders probably experience stable hypomania—the only mildly-delusional form that doesn’t interfere much with life.

Eternalism straight-up

Eternalism is most obvious in systems that reinforce it with concepts. For example, Christianity reinforces eternalism with beliefs about God, who makes everything meaningful.

My slot-machine experience was eternalism straight-up, with no conceptual framework. God was not in the picture, because I’m a life-long atheist, and thirty-seven cents was not enough to change my mind about Him. Probably if I had believed in God, my mental commentary would have been about my relationship with Him, though.

Instead, I had just a vague feeling about my relationship with the Non-Me. When I say I felt that “the universe loves me,” this did not involve any concept of “the universe” as a thing; rather, a vague omnidirectional feeling of being loved.

Eternalism and systems

It’s easy to see how experiences similar to mine in the casino (but more intense or frequent) can grow into eternalist systems. Put a name on the feeling, make up some theories about it, and you’ve founded a religion, self-help movement, or alternative therapy. Your vague certainty that everything now makes sense justifies your metaphysical speculations.

Established eternalist systems can also co-opt such experiences, and use them to reinforce their conceptual dogmas. Whenever someone feels something like I did, the system’s representative can say “Yes! You got it! That was God’s love / psychological integration / enlightenment / healing energy / etc.”

And when, inevitably, it dissipates, he or she will tell you what you need to do to get it back. Eternalist systems relentlessly exploit this addictive dynamic.

Critics of eternalist systems usually attack their beliefs. False beliefs are mostly not what make eternalism compelling, though—it’s the emotional dynamics. Addiction is only one of those.

To free yourself, or others, from eternalism, addressing the emotional dynamics is even more important than refuting concepts.

Eternalism makes you miserable

Unfortunately, we can’t experience unexpected success very often; we’d come to expect it. Trying to prolong the dopamine high usually makes you miserable instead.

Gamblers almost all lose money in the long run. Coming off of cocaine is depressing. Then it takes bigger and bigger doses to get you equally high, with increasingly nasty side-effects. Mania ends in crippling depression.

Eternalism also always lets you down. It seems to offer hope and solace, but in the end it always runs into the brick wall of reality. Then, when it’s impossible to ignore nebulosity, you feel abandoned by the eternal ordering principle. That’s the profoundest possible betrayal.

Even nihilism feels better at such times.

And so, automatically, we swing back and forth between the two.

• 1. More formally, patternicity is called “apophenia.”
• 2. This is according to current neuroscience, which is always subject to revision. I think the connection between gambling, patternicity, addiction, mania, and eternalism holds regardless of the mechanism.
• 3. The science of this isn’t yet clear, as of 2013. Other neurotransmitters are also involved.
• 4. Depression is closely connected with nihilism, just as hypomania is connected with eternalism. Depressives experience below-average patternicity, and diminished pleasure and motivation from unexpected successes.

Eternalism is the most attractive of all stances.1 It’s simple and easy to understand. It promises everything you could want from meaning: certainty, safety, understanding, and control. It offers solid ground; a foundation on which you can build a meaningful life.

Eternalism guarantees that everything is under control, meaningness-wise. Meanings are clear and fixed; they won’t slide out from under you. Ethics won’t change with fashion; your purpose in life won’t suddenly become pointless; you are not going turn into someone other than the person you truly are and have always been.

If you play your part in the Cosmic Plan, everything will be well. You are guaranteed a good outcome if you follow the rules. Even when your life seems to be a chaotic disaster, even when you doubt whether it means anything—even then, it is all part of the Cosmic Plan, and there is nothing to worry about. Conflict and uncertainty, all sorts of messiness about meaning—these are only illusions.

• 1. Eternalism seems also to be the most biologically natural stance. Something like it is automatic; our brains just go there by default. See the discussions of patternicity earlier, and magical thinking later. More precisely, the innate human worldview is probably animism, which is not quite eternalistic. Animism makes everything meaningful, but does not make explicit that everything is meaningful—which is part of my understanding of eternalism.

Eternalism pretends to offer certainty. It pretends that behind apparent chaos, there is a perfect pattern that explains everything. It pretends to end all doubt, and the suffering, confusion, and anxiety that comes with it.

Eternalism can be exhilarating! It cannot deliver accurate answers, but it can deliver a feeling of certainty—temporarily. You adopt the eternalist stance by blinding yourself to nebulosity; by pretending not to see contradictions.

It’s a huge relief, an occasion of joy, to set aside all doubts. Adopting eternalism frees all the energy that was tied up by internal divisions; power struggles within the self.1 Certainty about life-purpose and ethics ends confusion about what to do and how to live; full of confidence, you can make rapid progress in life.

Eternalism is now typically packaged in systems. Sometimes raw eternalism can provide certainty without specifics—as in my casino experience. Usually, though, we need a web of justifications, of canned answers, to not-see nebulosity. That’s what ideologies—religions, political theories, secular cults—provide. These justifications frequently fail, when nebulosity contradicts them.

When the fantasy of absolute answers is threatened by evidence, eternalism responds with various psychological ploys. These include, for instance, suppressing dissenting thoughts, physically removing yourself from contradictory situations, kitschy sentimentality, blind faith, mystification, and arming yourself against perception.

Eternalism is at its most glorious in a conversion experience, during the honeymoon after you have first committed to a system. That can last for a few weeks to a few years; for as long as you can silence your internal voices of doubt. Eventually it becomes impossible to not-see the evidence against the system. You may remain committed, but it can only be a wavering commitment. The honeymoon turns into a warm memory, cherished on Sunday mornings but increasingly distant from everyday experience.

Alternatively, seeking renewed certainty, you may search for a new system. Some people become serial conversion junkies. But as with opiate addiction, it becomes harder and harder to recreate the first high. And the periods of doubt between commitments, like heroin withdrawal, turn increasingly into nihilistic anxiety and despair. This pattern was particularly common in the California Bay Area in the late 20^th century. It afflicted many of my friends, and that was my initial motivation to write this book. Since I started writing, more than a decade ago, new patterns have emerged—but they are no less dysfunctional.

In the 21^st century West, there are hundreds of competing eternalist systems. Although they all have the same fundamental stance toward meaning, and the same emotional dynamics, they disagree sharply about specifics. This adds to the chaos and confusion that eternalism tries to dispel. Further, there is widespread understanding that none of the systems can provide certainty. The search for the One True System no longer seems credible.

In fact, the kinds of answers we want cannot be had, anywhere. Accepting this fact may lead to nihilism, the denial of all meaning. That is a bad outcome—but not a necessary one.

The complete stance recognizes that certainty is impossible, but that meaning is real. If we set aside the futile hope for absolute answers, we can find patterns of meaning that are usually good enough to navigate our lives. No ultimate, perfectly reliable foundation for morality or purpose is possible—but we do regularly solve problems of ethics and direction; and therefore we can!

• 1. Kramer and Alstad’s The Guru Papers provides a penetrating analysis of the joy of eternalist self-blinding, particularly in the case of American pop religion, but also in eternalist political systems such as Communism.

Total understanding—the feeling that everything makes sense—is one of the most seductive promises of eternalism. The feeling is wonderful, but unfortunately the understanding is illusory.

Recent research shows how illusions of understanding arise, what their effects are, and how they can be dispelled. Most concretely, this includes studies of illusory understanding of everyday physical causality: common natural phenomena and household devices. That isn’t directly relevant to Meaningness. However, the same patterns of illusory understanding also apply to issues of meaningness, such as ethics and politics.

Understanding and explanation

Certainty, understanding, and control are closely linked promises of eternalism.1 If you are certain an explanation is correct, you have a stronger feeling of understanding. If you have an explanation for why something means something, it increases your certainty that it does mean that. If you understand something, you feel that you can control it. Psychology experiments show that people feel they can control events they definitely can’t, so long as they understand them.

Personal accounts of conversion to communism—an eternalist political ideology—provide fine examples of the emotional power of illusory understanding. Conversion brings newfound optimism, joy, insight, and all-encompassing comprehension.

The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past—a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don’t know.2

After all, every minute aspect of daily life is caught up in systems of material production, and therefore can be subjected to Marxist analysis. Waiting at the bus stop, the scheduled times for three buses go by, and then two appear all at once. Why? Because of capitalist exploitation. Everything is because of capitalist exploitation.

(Exercises for the reader: (1) Figure out why capitalist exploitation explains this common pattern of bus arrivals. (2) Figure out a better, non-Marxist explanation.3)

Marxism, like Catholicism, is an extremely well-worked-out system. Countless brilliant intellectuals, working for centuries, have already figured out explanations for everything. Well, almost everything. If you are willing to swallow a few camels, Jesuits will strain out all the gnats for you. In other words, if you accept a few giant absurdities, they can give coherent, logical explanations for all details.

Newer, less-elaborated ideologies—UFO cults, for example—may provide a strong, if vague, feeling of understanding. However, they have few explanations to back that up. This is one reason they mostly only work as closed subcultures. If you are a communist or Catholic, you can talk to outsiders without your belief system collapsing, because you have answers to their objections.

Illusions of understanding: everyday causality

Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, in an influential 2002 paper, showed that people believe they understand familiar manufactured objects (such as can openers) and natural phenomena (such as tides) much better than they actually do. The researchers had subjects rate their understanding of various objects and phenomena, and then asked them to give an explanation. After that, the subjects rated their own understanding again. Their second ratings were much lower. Most subjects were surprised to find, after trying and failing to explain, that they understood much less than they had thought.

You might like to try this before reading on. On a scale of 1 to 7, how well do you think you understand a can opener? 1 would mean you know what it is for, but have basically no idea how it works. 7 means you know everything that anyone would know, short of being a can opener designer.

Now, explain how a can opener works. You could write this out in words, or draw a can opener from memory. Label the parts with what they do. (No fair looking at the picture at the head of this page! And for a fair trial, you need to do this on paper or screen; as we’ll see, it’s almost impossible not to cheat if you do it in your head.)

When you are done: has your estimate of your depth of understanding changed?

Now go look at an actual can opener, and at least put it up against a can as if you were about to open it. Turn the handle and watch how the mechanism moves. Then re-rate your written understanding. And how well do you think you understand now, after examining the reality?

I did this after reading the Rozenblit paper, and was surprised to find that my explanation had some details wrong, and significant missing parts. I also discovered, after playing with two ordinary manual crank-turning can openers, that they worked on completely different principles. I’ve used both types a million times, and never noticed this, because you use them exactly the same way. My rating of my original understanding went from 6 to 3. I’m estimating my new understanding at 6, but I’m worried I’m still overconfident!

It turns out that for most everyday objects, we have some vague mental image, but not an actual causal understanding. Here’s the Rozenblit paper:

Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do. … [They] wrongly attribute far too much fidelity and detail to their mental representations because the sparse renderings do have some efficacy and do provide a rush of insight.

(“A rush of insight”… Remind you of something? A spectre haunting Europe, perhaps?)

We think we understand a can opener because we can play a mental movie of using one. That feels as though it is almost as good as actually watching. But:

The mental movie is much more like Hollywood than it is like real life—it fails to respect reality constraints. When we try to lean on the seductively glossy surface we find the façades of our mental films are hollow card-board. That discovery, the revelation of the shallowness of our mental representations for perceptually salient processes, may be what causes the surprise in our participants.

Unless you are a kitchen tool engineer, there’s no reason to actually understand how a can opener works. What everyone else needs is to know (1) what it is for and (2) how to use it. So most of the time “understanding” is really “comfort with.” It means you know how to interact with it well enough to get by, and you are reassured that it is not going to explode without warning. This comfort is provided mainly by familiarity, not understanding. Having used a can opener many times convinces you that you understand it, because you can almost always make one work, and you almost never cut yourself. Tellingly, Rozenblit and Keil found that their subjects did not overestimate their “how-to” knowledge, only their “how-it-works” knowledge.4

Learning how things work is usually a waste of time, from an evolutionary perspective. And total understanding is never even possible. The “illusion of explanatory depth” may have evolved to tell us when to stop:

We have to learn to use much sparser representations of causal relations that are good enough to give us the necessary insights: insights that go beyond associative similarity but which at the same time are not overwhelming in terms of cognitive load. It may therefore be quite adaptive to have the illusion that we know more than we do so that we settle for what is enough. The illusion might be an essential governor on our drive to search for explanatory underpinnings; it terminates potentially inexhaustible searches for ever-deeper understanding by satiating the drive for more knowledge once some skeletal level of causal comprehension is reached.

This doesn’t always work right; our brains’ guesses about when to stop can go wrong. Education theorists find that students often stop trying to understand too soon, when they merely feel “familiar” with the material, because the modern classroom demands a depth of understanding beyond what would have been useful to our ancestors. Conversely, my interest in Precambrian evolution is probably a pathological result of mild autism—a brain abnormality.

If you look closely at a can opener in operation, you can see immediately how it works. Then you forget as soon as you look away. Knowing that you could figure out how something works, whenever you need to, is a good reason not to bother until then—and not to remember afterward. Rozenblit and Keil hypothesized that our brains confuse vague visual memory with understanding, and that this was the source of the illusion they found.

This was confirmed in Rebecca Lawson’s study of people’s understanding of bicycles. She found that most people have no clue what a bicycle looks like, much less how one works, even if they own one. (I know that sounds implausible; the results in the paper are dramatic.) We all have a memory of seeing a bicycle, and on that basis think we know what one looks like—but few people can draw something that’s even approximately similar. The bicycle-like things they do draw could not possibly work.

You might like to try this before reading on. Don’t bother being artistic; the picture can just show how the main parts (handlebars, frame, seat, pedals, chain, wheels) attach to each other.

Lawson found that people can easily understand how a bicycle works, and draw one accurately, if there’s one in front of them. She writes:

We may be using the world as an “outside memory” to save us from having to store huge amounts of information. Since much of the information that we need in everyday life can be found simply by moving our eyes, we do not need to store it and then retrieve it from memory.

(This point will be important, by the way, in my explanations for how meaning works, much later in this book.)

Here’s a bicycle drawn by someone who rides one most days:

This “bicycle” couldn’t turn, because the front wheel is connected to frame struts that form two sides of a rigid quadrilateral. Mistakenly, it has the chain going around the front wheel as well as the back one, which also would make turning impossible (among other problems, with gearing for instance).

Perceptual understanding isn’t possible for all devices—for example if they have hidden parts, or are very complicated, or run on invisible forces such as electricity.5

So what about meaning, which is also invisible?

Illusions of understanding: ethics

Most people think they understand ethics reasonably well. However, their ethical explanations often don’t make sense; they depend on weird assumptions, use dream logic, or skip over major issues. My story “The puzzle of meaningness” includes some humorous examples. Our feeling of understanding ethics is largely illusory; we don’t notice that our own ethical explanations are incoherent.

The following question is a classic of moral psychology research:

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.”6 So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s laboratory to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

You might like to write out your own brief explanation before reading on.

This exercise may seem risky or embarrassing. A feeling of moral competence is often close to the heart of one’s sense of self. However, most experts say there is no right or wrong answer, although there are interestingly different kinds of answers.

It might also help to know that even professional theologians and moral philosophers are often unable to give coherent ethical explanations. Despite fancy footwork, theological answers boil down to “because that’s what God wants,” with no clear reason He wants that. Secular academic theories of ethics are all known to be wrong. Moral philosophers must support some theory, arguing “this is less bad than the others,” but most admit that their professional expertise is rarely useful when dealing with everyday ethical problems. Evidently, professional ethicists are afflicted with a powerful illusion of explanatory depth.

Why do people think they mostly understand ethics, if they can’t explain it coherently? As with can openers, we know what it is for, and we know how to use it well enough to get by. The feeling of understanding is an illusion based on familiarity and comfort. We know through experience that we can navigate ethical issues reasonably reliably, and they are not going to suddenly explode. As with devices, this is adequate for most people most of the time.

Ethics sometimes does explode on you—for example, if you are caught having an affair. It’s not just that there will be bad consequences; there will be many difficult choices and judgements in sorting out the mess, and the inadequacy of your ethical understanding may become obvious. Sometimes such crises lead to psychological growth, including developing a more sophisticated ethical understanding.

Research in moral psychology has found that people’s ethical understanding passes through a predictable series of stages. The stages are defined not in terms of what people consider right or wrong, but what sorts of explanations they use to justify those judgements. The Heinz story was invented by Lawrence Kohlberg as a way of eliciting such explanations. He assigned them to six stages of moral development. There are some problems with Kohlberg’s theory—mainly, it is too rationalistic—but the conclusion that people advance from lesser to greater ethical understanding seems correct, and important.

Disquietingly, research has found that most adults get stuck somewhere in the middle of the developmental sequence. The illusion of ethical understanding is one reason they may not progress. As with bicycles, if you think you know how ethics works, and can use it well enough most of the time, there seems no reason to try to understand better.

Robert Kegan has extended and improved Kohlberg’s framework. He describes an ethical equivalent to Rozenblit and Keil’s discovery that attempting to explain things can reveal one’s own lack of understanding. The illusion of understanding sometimes dissolves when you have to give an ethical explanation.

Realizing your explanations are inadequate opens the possibility of a forward ethical stage transition. This happens only rarely, however. One reason is that it is easy to recognize that your understanding of a bicycle is wrong, by visually comparing your drawing with a real one. It is much harder to reality-test moral understanding, because ethics are far more nebulous than bicycles.

Eternalism, by promoting a reassuring illusion of ethical understanding, hinders moral development. This is most obvious in religious fundamentalism, which denies the nebulosity of ethics, stranding you in a childish moral understanding. Rationalist eternalism typically fixates some moral theory that is also obviously wrong, but does have some coherent systematic justification. These are adolescent rather than childish; utilitarianism is a common example.

Fortunately, eternalist ethical systems have become less credible, so it’s easier to advance to more sophisticated understandings. Unfortunately, “easier” is not “easy,” and ethical anxiety—a sense of being lost at sea when it comes to ethics—is increasingly prevalent. That is a major topic of the upcoming chapter on ethics.

Illusions of understanding: politics

Contemporary “politics” is mostly about polarized moral opinions.7 It is now considered normal, or even obligatory, for people to express vehement political opinions about issues they know nothing about, and which do not affect their life in any way. This is harmful and stupid.

“Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding” (Fernbach et al., 2013) applies the Rozenblit method to political explanations. After subjects tried to explain how proposed political programs they supported would actually work, their confidence in them dropped. Subjects realized that their explanations were inadequate, and that they didn’t really understand the programs. This decreased their certainty that they would work. The subjects expressed more moderate opinions, and became less willing to make political donations in support of the programs, after discovering that they didn’t understand them as well as they had thought.

Fernbach et al. found that subjects’ opinions did not moderate when they were asked to explain why they supported their favored political programs. Other experiments have found this usually increases the extremeness of opinions, instead. Generating an explanation for why you support a program, rather than of how it would work, leads to retrieving or inventing justifications, which makes you more certain, not less. These political justifications usually rely on abstract values, appeals to authority, and general principles that require little specific knowledge of the issue. They are impossible to reality-test, and therefore easy to fool yourself with.

Extreme, ignorant political opinions are largely driven by eternalism. I find the Fernbach paper heartening, in showing that people can be shaken out of them. Arguing about politics almost never changes anyone’s mind; explaining, apparently, does.

This suggests a practice: when someone is ranting about a political proposal you disagree with, keep asking them “how would that part work?” Rather than raising objections, see if you can draw them into developing an ever-more-detailed causal explanation. If they succeed, they might change your mind! If not—they might change their own.

How does eternalism create illusions of understanding?

Eternalism promises to make everything make sense. It sometimes does deliver an illusion of universal understanding (as in the account of conversion to communism, above). Usually it can’t quite manage that, because almost all eternalism is wavering. The curtain that is supposed to conceal the illusionist is translucent. Most people realize they don’t understand everything. Still, eternalism does trick most people into believing they understand many things they don’t.

Somehow, we don’t notice that our explanations don’t make sense. How does eternalism manage that? I don’t have a complete answer, but I do have pieces of an answer. In fact, there is no one answer; eternalism has a big bag of tricks. The main part of this chapter describes a series of eternalist ploys: ways of thinking, feeling, talking, and acting that stabilize the stance. All of these are tricks for deliberately not understanding meaningness.

The rest of this page discusses some other mechanisms that don’t fit into this “eternalist ploy” category.

Visualizing meaningness

Research like Lawson’s bicycle experiment shows that genuine understanding usually depends on perceptual support. It comes from exploring concrete examples by looking and poking. To some extent we can transfer that understanding by mental visualization; but as Rozenblit found, this is sketchy.

Direct perceptual support is generally impossible for meaningness (ethics, purpose, and so on). However, we do use mental images to help understand these issues too. Thinking about the Heinz story, I generated an image of his children watching their mother dying, for example. Likewise, when thinking about life purpose, we fantasize scenes of accomplishment, or imagine dying without having gotten anything much done.

These images are emotive, but probably mostly unrealistic and unhelpful. (The Heinz story didn’t even mention children, for example; maybe he didn’t have any!) I suspect eternalism leads us to take these mental movies much more seriously than they deserve. (How? I’m not sure.)

Mystical experiences of total understanding

People in non-ordinary states, produced by psychedelic drugs or meditation, often proclaim sudden, unshakable, universal understanding. They rarely or never can explain their supposed understanding. I think these are probably mostly illusory. Such experiences may give genuine but ineffable insight into some things. I’m reasonably sure they involve no actual understanding of most things.

Eternalist systems are often led by people who have such visions; but most of their adherents don’t. Ordinary eternalists have to rely on the cosmic understanding of special people.

Socially distributed (mis)understanding of meaning

Understanding of the physical world is socially distributed. You don’t need to understand how to build a bicycle frame, because there are people whose job that is, and you can rely on their understanding.

The same division of labor applies to understanding meaning.8 For instance, if you are Catholic, you know (or should know) that masturbation is a grave sin.9 Why?

You may remember the story of Onan, who spilled his seed on the ground. You may also remember that the story is not about masturbation, but coitus interruptus. (That’s confusing.) You may recall that masturbation is a sin against chastity, and that the only proper use of the genitals is procreation. Or maybe also conjugal love. Why?

This is a pesky, impertinent question. You are (or should be) quite certain that you are correct, even if you can’t give a coherent explanation.

You don’t need to be able to give an explanation, because you know that if you go to a Jesuit, he will (or should)10 be able to explain in detail, with extensive logic, and answers to all objections. Your certainty can rest on your knowledge that an explanation is available, without having to know the details.

Although... for nearly everyone, it’s obvious that whatever explanation a priest gives for the evil of masturbation, it will be nonsense. It will be verbiage that sounds like explanation, but isn’t. Only loyalty to the eternalist system—the will to believe—could fool anyone into thinking it’s meaningful.

The same is true for most political opinions. Individuals are usually incapable of producing coherent explanations; but why should they?

You have heard experts on TV explaining Benghazi and Keystone, and they seemed to make sense; and you know they are good and trustworthy and smart people, because they share your fundamental values. You might not be able to explain those issues in detail, but you are confident that they can. But perhaps those explanations are about as accurate as the priest’s?

Agreeing to agree about meanings

Because eternalist delusion is so desirable, people collude to maintain it. We all agree to agree—vociferously—to whatever meanings our social group comes up with. That is a genuinely compassionate activity. We all want to save each other from nihilism.

Agreeing violently about political opinions is a major social activity. Groups of friends get together and regurgitate political explanations they’ve heard on TV or read on the web. This reinforces certainty and the illusion of understanding.

Talent for regurgitation gives you social prestige; people think it’s an important life skill. Imagine—if you got good enough at it, you could go on TV and vomit opinions in front of millions of people! Mostly, though, this is a collaborative, improvisatory, small-group activity.

Similarly, ethical explanation is mainly a social activity. Moral philosophers want ethics to be about rational individual decision-making, but it mostly isn’t. (This is one reason academic ethics is so useless.)

Research by Jonathan Haidt and others shows that ethical explanations are mostly used to justify actions we have taken or want to take. This “social intuitionism” is a descriptive theory, about how ethics works in practice. It’s not a good account (even according to Haidt) of how ethics ought to work.

In the ethics chapter, I’ll ask “what is ethics for?” if not social justification, and not rational individual decision-making. I’ll argue that genuine understanding is genuinely valuable.

• 1. Nevertheless, certainty, understanding, and control all seem to be separate innate psychological drives. We seek certainty, even when understanding is entirely unavailable. We seek understanding, even when control is obviously impossible. Personally, I love understanding things like supernovas and Precambrian evolution, even though there’s nothing I can do with them.
• 2. The God That Failed is a famous collection of accounts by Western intellectuals explaining why they converted to communism and later became disenchanted. I’m relying here on the summary in Baumeister’s Meanings of Life, p. 299. The quote is from Arthur Koestler, p. 23 in The God That Failed according to Baumeister; italics in original.
• 3. This is called “bus bunching”; the Wikipedia has a fascinating explanation. The dynamical chaos theory used there is also important in my explanation of how meaning works.
• 4. This result is actually a bit surprising, because the psychological literature generally finds that most people are overconfident about most things. Rozenblit and Keil did find overconfidence effects for some other types of knowledge, such as geography, but overconfidence about causality was much larger.
• 5. Rozenblit and Keil found preliminary evidence that subjects were less likely to overestimate their understanding in these cases. I don’t know whether this has been confirmed by subsequent studies.
• 6. If you know the least bit about drug development, this story will seem absurdly unrealistic. That annoys me. Maybe this absurdity is not relevant to the essential ethical dilemma, which you are supposed to somehow abstract from the details. However, I worry that unrealistic scenarios—the famous “trolley problems” are another example—give misleading results. In fact, I suspect artificial “thought experiments,” even if they weren’t obviously silly, may be worse than useless for understanding ethics. I’ll suggest later that observation of real-life ethical deliberation and action in “ecologically valid conditions” is needed instead.
• 7. I’ll analyze this important, unfortunate development repeatedly, at various points later in the book.
• 8. This will be central in my eventual explanation for how meaningness works. Interestingly (to me), my PhD thesis—titled Vision, Instruction, and Action—is also about perceptual understanding during improvised activity, and socially distributed understanding (communicated through over-the-shoulder instructions) of that activity.
• 9. See Catechism 2396 if you are in doubt.
• 10. Disastrously, some priests have gotten wobbly on masturbation, and are leading millions into damnation.

If only you could get control over your life. If only things went according to plan. If only people did what they’re supposed to.

None of that is going to happen. Reality is often chaotic. Things fall apart, break down, slip away, blow up in your face—metaphorically, or for real.

The physical world, the social world, our selves, and meanings: all are nebulous—amorphous, ambiguous, changeable, uncertain. This makes complete control impossible.

Eternalism denies nebulosity. It hints that you can get control over your life—if you just make it conform to the proper patterns. This fantasy is one of eternalism’s strongest selling points—and most harmful lies.

Pursuing that fantasy has predictable bad results. Attempts to exert partial influence are often sensible and successful; attempts to gain complete control are dopey and disastrous.

Control is a major topic that shows up in many parts of this book. Besides eternalism, it is central for two dimensions of meaning, capability and contingency. It’s also significant in dualism, and plays a major role in confusions about the self, ethics, authority, and sacredness. This page is an introductory overview.

Control is closely connected with certainty and understanding, covered in the previous two pages. You may find it helpful to read those, if you haven’t already.

Nebulosity makes complete control impossible

“Nebulosity”—cloud-like-ness—is the impossibility of completely grasping anything. If we could just get a handle on things, we could force them to behave. But, to varying degrees, we never can.

This applies to the physical world, just as it does to the psychological, social, and meaning worlds. It is never possible to get perfect control even over a simple mechanical device. I’ll give technical explanations for this later, in discussions of dynamical chaos and the objective inseparability of objects. A simple way to see it, though: your device could always get hit by meteor, at any time, and then it will stop doing what you want. This is very unlikely, but shows that the world is never perfectly predictable.

Most activities involve other people, who are notoriously difficult to control. Even the most powerful tyrant cannot entirely manage it. Worse, perhaps, you cannot always control even yourself. Sometimes you find yourself doing things you hadn’t intended, and will probably regret later, because it’s what you want at the time. And, even when events go according to plan, their meanings may squirm out from under you. The outcome you so desired may be, objectively, just as you wanted it—and yet it no longer seems significant, as it did when you began. (I’ll say more about each of these types of failure of control later on this page.)

Overall, nebulosity often seems the main obstacle to control,1 and pattern the main resource. Nebulosity, therefore, often becomes the hated enemy. Eternalism promises to make nebulosity go away by fixating patterns, making complete control possible. Of course, it cannot.

Fortunately, nebulosity is not actually a hostile force. It delivers unexpected opportunities, and surprising good outcomes as well as bad ones. Learning to appreciate nebulosity is an important way out of eternalism and into the complete stance.

Pattern makes interaction possible

In the ideal situation of perfect control, you could make anything you want happen simply by choosing it. You would be unconstrained—causally unaffected—by the outside world. Control would flow only outward from you toward the world. The locus of control would be purely internal to you.

In the opposite extreme, you would be entirely controlled by the world, and any choices you might make would be meaningless. The locus of control would be entirely external, and causality would flow only inward, from the world acting on you.

Neither of these extremes occurs in reality. Ultimately, this is a fact of physics; causality is always distributed, and one thing cannot affect another without also being affected by it to some extent.2 However, it’s also obvious in everyday life, so long as you look without forcing an extreme internalist or externalist view.

Locus of control, in other words, is always nebulous: partial, shifting, uncertain, ambiguous. This is partly because the self/other boundary is itself nebulous; it’s often unclear what is “me” and what is “that.” Partly self and other are nebulous because locus of control is nebulous; these are, in part, two ways of saying the same thing. (This is a key aspect of my analysis of what “self” means.)

Because “control” is often understood as “complete control,” an alternate vocabulary may be useful. One might speak of “influence,” meaning partial control, for example. This is somewhat misleading, though, by suggesting that you are active and the world is passive (although passive-aggressive: it doesn’t always do what you tell it).

I prefer the word interaction: it suggests that both you and the world are actively participating in determining what happens.3 “Interaction” covers causality shared with both the non-human world and with other people.

Improvisation is characteristic of interaction. Because the world is nebulous, you can’t plan in advance everything you are going to do. You always have to figure some actions out as you go along. Usually, when the time comes, it’s obvious what you need to do, although you could not have foreseen it.

Collaboration is the most important form of interaction.4 Most human activities involve other people. Human interactions may be hostile; not all are collaborations. But collaborations are the most valuable, and most interesting (to me at least).

Practical activity is a spontaneous partner dance. You are continually responsive to the details of your unfolding situation, as revealed by perception. It is futile to try to force interactions to conform to a preconceived idea of how things should go.

“Control” sometimes has negative connotations, and “collaboration” positive ones. However, my point is not moral or political. The issue here is not that control is not nice, it’s that complete control is physically impossible.

So long as you recognize that nebulosity is inevitable, there is nothing necessarily wrong with seeking partial control. Sometimes it’s even ethically imperative to get as much control as possible; for example in designing and operating a nuclear power plant.5

The psychology of control confusions

The rest of this page covers specific confused attitudes to control:

• Illusory control
• Control breakdowns, and explaining-away lack of control
• The illusion of zero control
• The impossibility of self-control
• The impossibility of control of other people
• Illusions of control by proxy
• Monist and dualist approaches to control
• The fantasy of getting what you want by renouncing control
• Stupid things people do when control gets boring
• The impossibility of controlling meaningness itself

Illusions of control

In many situations, it is difficult or impossible to know how much control you have. You have to guess, based on understanding and experience. Extensive psychological research6 has shown that most people overestimate how much control they have—or could get—most of the time. This has several objectively harmful effects.

If you believe you have more control than you do, you are likely to take larger risks than you should. Experiments (and everyday experience) show that overconfidence leads to gambling-like behavior. It accounts for a lot of stupid accidents and bad life-decisions.

Overconfidence that you can eventually get control (through practice, or by applying bigger hammers) can make you waste time and resources trying to control the uncontrollable. Combined with the sunk cost fallacy, this can lead to applying ever increasing resources to an unworkable strategy. Believing that control must always be possible makes it difficult to learn from failure. Each disaster looks like a mere temporary setback, and you may take it as evidence that even more violent effort is called for.

Eternalism can make anything less than complete control emotionally unacceptable. Letting go, and accepting partial control, may seem too threatening. Then you may pursue control for its own sake, even when it has no objective benefit, or when the costs of maintaining control are obviously too high.

Control is only ever partial; but eternalistic hope for complete control can lead to over-controlling. That is the counter-productive application of extra force, complexity, or rigidity, when those actually result in less control, not more; or when the cost of increasing control outweighs its benefits.

Since it is pattern that makes partial control possible, over-control often attempts to impose a pattern by brute force. The pattern may be a real one that just doesn’t fit the situation (you are not actually that person’s best friend, so they aren’t going to do that task for you); or it may be an entirely imaginary one (you can’t actually find a cure for your retinopathy using tarot cards). Eternalism often leads to inventing spurious patterns that would grant control, and clinging to them even when there’s strong evidence against them, if that would mean loss of the illusion of control.7

A strong emotional need for control may lead you to refuse to deal with parts of reality that you can’t control to your satisfaction. Some people organize their lives to avoid most social interactions, or responsibility for anything mechanical, or dealing with money—as much as possible. Abandoning the possibility of incomplete control can have a high cost, drastically narrowing the scope of your life.8

One common response to nebulosity is excessive, obsessive planning: trying to figure out everything that could go wrong, and what you’d do if it did. Sometimes this is wise, but when you don’t fully understand the pattern, planning may be impossible. Over-control and planning also blind you to serendipity and unexpected opportunities.

Often it is better to observe the actual pattern, and to intervene minimally in its flow as events unfold. This skillful improvisation—often coupled with collaboration—can redirect existing forces in the direction you want.9 Such interaction doesn’t provide complete control, but may give better results. It also allows you to change course when new positive possibilities open.

Breakdown

Eternalism promises complete control, but cannot deliver. How to sustain the illusion, when non-control becomes obvious?

The first response is to invent an excuse. Eternalism explains away each failure as a one-off special situation that does not predict future lack of control.

The excuses given by American government agencies and multinational CEOs are essentially the same as those of African witchdoctors and of drug addicts everywhere. This is highly amusing once you notice the pattern.

No one ever says “We mostly don’t understand what is going on; the effects of our actions are inherently unpredictable; and our motivations are mixed, so we often undermine our own effectiveness.” (Even though that’s always the truth for everyone and every organization.) Instead:

• Adverse global economic conditions
• Sudden ripening of negative karma from a previous life
• It’s society’s fault
• Profits were impacted by supply chain issues
• The gods are grumpy; someone in the village must be having an affair
• It was due to a few corrupt individuals, and does not reflect the high ethical standards, dedicated work, and consistent competence of the Department as a whole
• Negative energy from skeptics in the room interfered with the experiment
• Train delays due to the wrong type of snow on the tracks
• Demonic opposition, stirred up by enemy witchdoctors
• Operational irregularities occurred
• My assistant pronounced one of the words of the spell wrong
• I never get that drunk

Such excuses explain that the failure occurred only because you didn’t have control at the time. Therefore past failure doesn’t predict future failure, because of course in the future you will have control. Having control is “normal,” and should always be expected.

At some point, excuses run out, and the illusion of control collapses. Fear is the natural reaction to being out of control; and it can help deal with some bad situations. However, an eternalistic need to always maintain control can cause constant anxiety or even paranoia.

The eternalistic all-or-nothing tendency makes the sense of control brittle. Any temporary setback may flip you from an illusion of control into the illusion of no-control.

Illusion of helplessness: nihilistic anxiety and depression

Nihilism is the stance that denies all meaningful patterns. That makes meaningful control—or even influence—impossible.

Anxiety and depression are strongly associated with nihilism. Feeling of loss of control in a specific situation is frightening; feeling that you may lose all control produces pervasive anxiety. Concluding that you have lost all possibility of control—that you are entirely helpless—causes depression: the sense that all action is pointless.

Psychological research has demonstrated that depression collapses the illusion of control.10 Normally,11 people overestimate their control; when depressed, people may underestimate.12

Perceived lack of control results in learned helplessness—inhibition of practical action—which is believed to be closely related to depression.13 Similarly, people who experience an external locus of control have been shown to be prone to clinical depression.

Total responsibility is the confused stance, promoted by popular “spiritual” systems, that “you create your own reality.” Implicitly, it requires complete control of every aspect of the universe. The opposite stance, victim-think, promoted by popular “political,” “ethical,” and “psychological” systems, requires denying that you have any influence or power. Both stances try to save you from confronting the fearful question “how much control do I actually have?”. However, both absolutist answers lead to dysfunction and misery.

Research finds that people who perceive control as partly internal and partly external, and that it shifts back and forth, handle difficulties more effectively than those with either external or internal locus. This resonates with my claims for the psychological value of the complete stance. For this dimension of meaningness—capability—I call the complete stance light-heartedness. I’ve summarized it thus:

Playfully co-create reality in collaboration with each other and the world. No need for self-criticism or for anxiety. Effortless creativity. Obstacle: Hard to let go of need to be reassured about outcomes.

Self-control is impossible

This is obvious to anyone who has struggled to lose weight.

Eternalism wants to see the self as unitary, separate, durable, consistent, and well-defined—because then it could be in control. We are none of those things. Our selves are inherently, inescapably nebulous; and therefore uncontrollable.

It is often more accurate to see one’s self as a community of divergent, competing desires, with constantly-shifting political coalitions among them. Depending on which have the upper hand at any moment, the actions one chooses change. This frequently undermines plans and intentions. When desire for romance gains power, it forms a firm intention to avoid ice cream to lose weight and become more attractive; but when dessert time comes, desire for noms foments rebellion.14

Many excuses—particularly the excuses you make to yourself—boil down to “it wasn’t really me who did that.” (“Everybody knows I’m not that kind of guy!”) At some level, this is outrageously hypocritical; but it is also honest and accurate. The political coalition of desires that drove drunk was not the same coalition that regrets it the next morning—and those coalitions are more-or-less what we call a “self.”15

Consistent choices would also depend on a clear boundary between “me in here” and “the world out there.” The self/other boundary is always somewhat nebulous, however; so you cannot make perfectly independent choices. The more open you are to others, the less control you have. You probably wouldn’t have driven home drunk if your friends at the bar hadn’t done the same.

Disgust with your own inconsistency motivates the stance of True Self. That would be “who I really am”16—a unitary, separate, durable, consistent, and well-defined ideal. The “false self” is the divided, easily-influenced, impetuous, devious, incoherent one. If only you could become your True Self, you would be perfectly virtuous and always in control.

The True Self stance motivates over-control of your desires, and totalitarianism in your internal politics. The supposed True Self—itself actually just a coalition of impulses, fantasies, and fears—becomes a tyrant. It enforces a rigid personal morality and exiles the rest of the self to a dank prison cell. Fearing internal anarchy, it suppresses most enjoyment, creativity, and spontaneity, lest they undermine its control. Festering in the dark, these suppressed self-fragments grow monstrous, twisted, powerful. When eventually they break out in revolt, the carnage can be gruesome.17

A healthy self is a series of negotiated compromises among hopes, fears, projects, desires, and relationships, based on recognition that complete control is impossible, so all aspects of the self get enough of what they need that conflict is minimized.

The upcoming chapter on selfness discusses these issues in detail.

Control of others is impossible (and attempts are harmful)

To gain complete control over your own life, you would need to control other people. Not only their actions, but also their thoughts and feelings—because those interact with your own.

Complete control of people is even more impossible than complete control of the inanimate world. Partial control or influence, by various means, is possible, and may often be benign. Sanity requires accepting that everything you do is a collaboration. It also requires accepting partial control (or influence) of others over you.

The eternalistic compulsion toward over-control leads to coercion and abuse of power. Ethical eternalism—moral certainty—provides spurious justifications for forcing other people to do what you want. This ranges in scale from family relationships to world wars.

Totalitarianism, a manifestation of political eternalism, is an extreme example. Ideologues rationalize oppression as necessary for preventing the nihilist apocalypse, a dystopian fantasy of ethical anarchy caused by loss of institutional control.

The stance of reasonable respectability, which fixates the social order, makes despotic control easier. Its opposite, romantic rebellion, denies the value of institutions, and views all power as illegitimate, coercive control.

Control by proxy

Identifying your self with a more powerful proxy can give a vicarious sense of control. This is a back-up strategy when personal control is too obviously impossible.

Proxies include individuals, such as political and religious leaders; social groups, such as tribes, nations, and sects; imaginary people, such as God, gods, or culture-heroes; and abstractions, such as political and religious ideologies.

This illusion of control depends on psychological identification, allegiance, and surrender. You have to give up your own control—in a particular area of life, at least—to transfer the locus to the proxy. Psychological surrender gives a feeling of connection or union with something much greater and more meaningful than your personal concerns.

Feeling that you are part of a group allows you to participate emotionally in its strength and success. This is true even when the tribe—or its leaders—do not provide you with any actual control over your life. Sports fandoms are a benign example. Oppressive political regimes that maintain popular support are perhaps the worst. Vicarious power through identification with the state seems an acceptable trade-off to many subjects.

In fact, this dynamic seems to underly most malign power relationships, ranging from domestic abuse through Stockholm syndrome and anti-life religions to totalitarian dystopias. Despotic “leaders” can never rule by force and fear alone; they depend on worshipful surrender and identification.18

Monism and dualism: control by connection and by separation

Eternalism comes in two main flavors, monist and dualist. Monism denies boundaries and fixates connections. Dualism denies connections and fixates boundaries.

Control usually depends on boundaries, connections, or both. Since both are ubiquitous, it’s usually best to consider and manipulate both. However, the monism and dualism’s denials lead them to ignore one, and to try to exert control only through the other.

Monism attempts control exclusively through connections. When genuine connections do not permit control, it invents imaginary ones. This is typical of magical thinking. “Psychic powers,” New Age quack therapies, and the Law of Attraction are typical examples.

Dualism attempts control exclusively through boundaries: categorizing, discriminating, separating, sorting, ranking, and purifying. This becomes dysfunctional when nebulous reality fails to fit into tidy boxes. Bureaucracy, caste systems, and “enterprise software” are typical examples.

Control by renouncing action

Popular “spiritual” books like The Secret recommend abandoning all attempts at control, or even action, in favor of spiritual virtue (“positive thinking”). This is an extreme version of control-by-proxy, in which the proxy is the Cosmic Plan, or The Entire Universe, and it does all the work.

This approach is typical in monist systems, which deny all boundaries. Since, monism says, you are The Entire Universe, its actions and yours are identical. Any attempt to act on your own simply limits you, by creating an artificial and illusory separation.

Renunciation often acts as a moralistic reward fantasy. For monism, control is not OK, because control depends on differences, which monism denies. Since everything is the same, everything is equal, and nothing can be allowed to control anything else. Giving up control is a supremely virtuous act, which The Entire Universe rewards by showering you with everything you could possibly want.

Obviously, adopting this strategy leads to severe emotional dysfunction, passive-aggressive relationships, and total inability or unwillingness to deal with everyday responsibilities.

Control is intolerably dull

Total control (which requires total predictability) is totally boring. Life needs some challenges, surprises, setbacks, and serendipity to make it interesting. Enjoyment and personal growth come only with partial control.19

Highly-successful people, whose lives are too much under control, often semi-deliberately mess them up, for example with an extramarital affair whose revelation destroys their career as well as their marriage. The thrill of risk, and the difficulty of avoiding detection, breaks the monotony of excessive control. It is better, of course, to leave what is going well on autopilot, and to take on greater challenges in new domains.

Meanings are out of control

Meaningness itself is nebulous, and therefore uncontrollable. This undermines practical activity that attempts to control meaningful conditions. Nebulosity of meaning implies constant uncertainty about the merits of purposes; about what counts as progress and setbacks; about what methods would be ethical or unethical; about how your choices shape and are shaped by your self; and about implications that may go beyond the personal, immediate, and obvious, into the greater, mysterious patterns of meaning claimed by religion and social philosophy.

“The puzzle of meaningness” illustrates many aspects of these problems in the context of an adultery.

The attraction was overwhelming. The sex was scalding. You loved with a passion you had never felt before.

In time, it waned; and you ended the affair.

Now, you wonder: what did that mean? In the beginning, it seemed enormously significant. By the end, it had slid into a casual friendship plus sex.

Were you mistaken in thinking it was meaningful at the start? Or did it have a meaning that it lost?

And was the affair right, or wrong, or perhaps somehow somewhere in-between?

What does it mean about you that you cheated—which you were sure you never would do? Should you be less certain about yourself in other ways?

Marriage is a sacrament; but this affair also seemed at first to have a sacred dimension. Was that just a self-justifying illusion?

• 1. Not always, of course; sometimes you simply lack the prerequisites needed for a course of action which would be highly likely to succeed if you had then.
• 2. At the level of fundamental physics, all forces are symmetrical; they act mutually on pairs of particles. This is not much relevant to everyday life, however. I’ll explain a more relevant, macroscopic understanding of distributed causality on the discussion of dynamical chaos.
• 3. “Interaction” is still somewhat misleading, unfortunately. It suggests that there are two or more objectively separate parties involved, which is not true.
• 4. My prehistoric PhD thesis was also about improvisation and collaboration, and the impossibility of control. Some people just don’t know when to move on in life.
• 5. Even there, tsunamis (for instance) make complete control impossible. Recognizing this, the trend in nuclear reactor design has been from active to passive safety. Active control makes human activity the locus, along with complex electrical systems to which humans delegate. It’s external to the reactor. Passive safety shifts the locus into the reactor itself. For example, in some designs, when things go wrong, it shuts down by literally falling apart. Gravity does the work.
• 6. Control is a major topic in academic psychological research. I have not studied the results seriously. This page is based largely on my informal observation of control confusions in everyday life. The research I have read accords with my observations. I have linked some topics to relevant Wikipedia pages, which could be starting points if you would like to investigate further. (As of mid–2015, most of the Wikipedia articles are not very good, but their references may be useful.) I have not found good overall review articles. This may be because control has been studied by many different branches of psychology, using different frameworks and terminology that are difficult to align. “Born to Choose: The Origins and Value of the Need for Control” includes a not-terrible survey.
• 7. The gambler’s fallacy is a well-studied, if somewhat simplistic, example. “Interpretive control” is a broader psychology research term for inventing explanations in order to feel you have control when you don’t. See for instance Baumeister’s Meanings of Life, p. 42.
• 8. Experimental psychology and psychotherapeutic theory corroborate most of the harmful control dynamics I describe here. Psychology has not found convincing reasons for them. They seem clearly maladaptive; so why do brains do these things? I suspect the answer is: eternalism, as such. The desire to believe that everything has a fixed meaning appears to be enormously powerful. It is significant that (as we’ll see in the next section) depression, which is the negation of eternalism, reverses most of these control dynamics. Although eternalism is partly innate, it is strongly reinforced by modern Western culture. It would be interesting to see whether harmful control dynamics are less prevalent among hunter-gatherer peoples, for instance. Based on the little I know of the relevant cognitive anthropology, I suspect the answer is yes.
• 9. I wrote about this in more detail, but in a rather different conceptual framework, in “Unclogging.”
• 10. Actually, the studies I have read only show a correlation between depression and absence of the illusion. I do not know of experiments that show conclusively which causes which. (If you do, I would love to hear about it!) Based on personal experience, I believe that the causality is bidirectional. That is, depression brought on for other reasons results in loss of the feeling of control, and feeling that important factors are out of control can provoke depression.
• 11. “Normally” here meaning what is most common: “under the influence of eternalism.” However, I don’t think eternalism is altogether natural. I would like to believe that the complete stance is “normal” (although uncommon) in being “natural”; and that adopting it would eliminate control illusions.
• 12. Originally this was called “depressive realism” because in the first experiments that demonstrated it, depressed people estimated their degree of control roughly correctly. However, subsequent experiments have shown that depression correlates just with decreased sense of control, and in some situations depressed people underestimate it.
• 13. The resulting psychological stress can be literally lethal in experimental animals.
• 14. George Ainsle’s Breakdown of Will is an outstanding analysis of this pattern, technically termed akrasia.
• 15. Breakdown of Will and The Guru Papers both provide much insight here.
• 16. This is an interesting example of the weaselly function of the word “really.”
• 17. I wrote about aspects of this in “We are all monsters,” “Eating the shadow,” and “Black magic, transformation, and power.” See also Breakdown of Will, The Guru Papers, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow, which discuss the pattern extensively.
• 18. The Guru Papers is an extensive, insightful analysis for the religious domain. For politics, “The Good Tsar Bias” analyzes several cases, including Hitler and Stalin. Both men created personality cults according to which they were powerful, benevolent leaders whose naive goodness enabled underlings to get away with incompetence, corruption, and mass murder. “If only Stalin knew what evils are done in his name!” was a common Russian attitude. “The closer a leader is tied to the symbols of the nation or group with whom they identify, and the closer people’s identification with the nation or group is, the more difficult it should be for them to accept that the leader is responsible for bad outcomes, since such acceptance threatens one’s identity, and the more likely it will be for them to displace that responsibility onto subordinates as a protective measure.”
• 19. This point was made famous by Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. See also my post “Tantra and flow.”

The meanings we care about first and foremost are good and bad. Not good and evil—not ethics, not yet—but good and bad for us. We want to know how the wheel of fortune will turn. Will particular people, things, and events be blessings—or disasters? Where do goodness and badness come from, and how can we influence them? What do good and bad events imply for other dimensions of meaningness—social relations, our selves, and our purposes?

Eternalism promises answers: certainty about what is good and what is bad, and understanding and control over what produces them. However, “good” and “bad” are not intrinsic qualities.1 Reality is not about us, and doesn’t know or care whether it benefits or harms us. “Good” and “bad” are not merely unpredictable; they are inherently nebulous: mixed, shifting, ambiguous. Thus, broad answers to “will good things or bad things happen?” are impossible.

And so, again, eternalism cannot deliver. Relying on its claims about good and bad is a recipe for disappointment, if not disaster.

Elaborating meanings of good and bad

Eternalism is about seeing meaning where there is none, and adding extra meaning even to what is already genuinely meaningful. Chance events—turns of the wheel of fortune—are taken not just as good or bad, but meaningfully good or bad.

Eternalism gives good and bad events implications for all the dimensions—purpose, ethics, our selves, social relations, and so on. Good outcomes are mistaken as rewards or confirmations. Bad ones appear as omens of still worse to come, or deserved punishments, or as tests from God.

The “just world hypothesis” is the pervasive assumption—explicit or tacit—that good and bad outcomes are not random, but deserved. The eternal ordering principle guarantees that. This is the beginning of the elaboration of good and bad into good and evil. Good and Evil often become independent actors: as vague “forces,” or personified as spooks,2 human individuals, or social groups.

Eternalistic systems typically promise good outcomes—for those who obey the demands of the eternal ordering principle. Bad outcomes are due to violations of the cosmic order. Violations can be reversed by purification, which restores the order.

If the eternal order can be violated, then how is it eternal? And, how can bad things happen to good people? Many outcomes are obviously random; eternalism is obviously wrong, as everyone knows at some level. Various strategies of self-delusion cover this up, in order to preserve an optimistic outlook. Elaborate theories of cosmic justice in the afterlife are attempts to preserve eternalism against everyday experience. When these eternalistic ploys fail, nihilism looms.

Good, bad, naturalism, and supernaturalism

A major theme of this chapter on eternalism is that errors usually attributed to supernaturalist religions are also common among atheists, and in naturalistic ideologies. This includes mistaken ideas about good and bad—but those are particularly prone to supernatural explanations.

In the short run, good and bad manifest as luck. A feeling of being lucky, or unlucky, is nearly impossible for even the most committed secular scientific rationalist to avoid at times. “I get duped by eternalism in a casino” is a personal account of such an incident. In “No cosmic justice” I observed that:

A vague, incoherent expectation of cosmic justice is one of the hardest aspects of our Christian heritage to shake off. I am a life-long atheist, and have never actually believed in cosmic justice. Yet I still sometimes catch myself hoping that I will somehow be magically rewarded for good deeds.

Magical thinking is a powerful eternalist ploy. It promises certainty about the spinning wheel of fortune, through esoteric techniques such as divination, psychobabble, and career counseling. Imaginary connections “explain” random coincidences. Underlying all this is the assumption that the universe is about us—and since our lives are meaningful, everything else must be, too.

Explicitly non-supernatural eternalisms make the same promises. Communism guarantees a good outcome for history: eventually capitalism must collapse, and be replaced by a worker’s paradise. UFO cults expect imminent salvation by benevolent aliens. Techno-futurists are sure a Singularity will soon deliver us from all material afflictions (or perhaps doom us to sudden extinction). These are all silly, but they postulate no supernatural forces.

Fate, destiny, and finality

In the long run, eternalism sees good and bad as the concern of fate. Proper distribution of good and bad is the main point of the Cosmic Plan. Both individuals and social groups (tribes, nations, even our species) supposedly have fates.

We are particularly concerned about what happens in the end. This is the matter of destiny. It is commonly considered that the only real meaning—of an object, event, life, or group—is the meaning it has as it ends. Whatever may happen before that doesn’t properly count.3 As an extreme case, in some versions of both Christianity and Buddhism, the only thing that matters for determining your fate in the afterlife is your mind state at the moment of death.

The final meaning is the eternal meaning, and therefore the “real” one. This discounts most actual meanings, in favor of eternalistically-ascribed ones—which is wrong. We’ll see later that this error leads to nihilism, when you realize that nothing is meaningful to you after you die.

Eternalism promises good outcomes to those who obey. Miserabilism, a stance closely connected with nihilism, guarantees everyone bad outcomes.

Beyond good and bad

Humans (and other animals) evolved to force-fit everything into the categories “good,” “bad,” and “irrelevant.”4 We make snap judgements about these three—and are often proven wrong. Some events are unambiguously one way or another; but even the most important ones usually have both good and bad aspects. We acknowledge this in phrases like “a silver lining” and “a mixed blessing.”

Recognizing the nebulosity of meanings is the way out of the maze of eternalism and nihilism, and into the complete stance. Suspending judgements of “good” and “bad” and “uninteresting” is a particularly effective escape route. Playful curiosity is characteristic of the complete stance. “What is this like?” and “How does it work?” and “What happens if…” are usually better questions than “Is this good, or bad?”

Qualifying judgements of good and bad is essential in adequate approaches to ethics and politics, particularly. (These will develop into major points later in the book.)

DESTINY: A tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure.5

Interpreting good and bad as good and evil turns them into absolutes, over which no compromise is possible. Ever-escalating embroilment ensues. Dropping good and evil is a first step toward a non-eternalist ethics. (Although only a first step—replacing them with “harm and benefit” can lead to eternalist utilitarianism, for instance. Those, too, are nebulous—so utilitarianism can’t succeed as an eternalist system.)

For politics to be anything more than a quantitative showdown, both sides in a conflict must recognize the nebulosity of their interests. Not only are those people not simply evil, and us folks not simply holy: what they want is not purely wrong, and what we want is not an unalloyed good. When all can drop the moral posturing, all may be able to work together to find an outcome all can live with—which will not be good, bad, or uninteresting, but a nebulous combination of all three.

• 1. They are not merely our opinions, either, though. As with all meanings, they are neither objective nor subjective.
• 2. Benevolent and malevolent spooks, as causal explanations for good and bad outcomes, are a cultural universal. Sometimes there are also moody spooks who alternate capriciously: a sensible explanation for the randomness of good and bad events. I find it sad and telling that few care what spooks think or do when it doesn’t affect humans.
• 3. I don’t know where this idea comes from. It’s obviously nonsense, but pervasive. I’ve tried to construct an explanation in terms of evolutionary psychology, according to which what mostly matters is whether you get progeny to adulthood before dying. An estimate of whether you are likely to succeed critically affects your optimal life strategy. The less likely evolutionary success is, the more evolutionarily rational high-stakes gambles (such as murder, rape, and robbery) become. I haven’t been able to make this explanation work, quite. Perhaps the source of the idea is mere cultural accident.
• 4. Presumably this is an efficient strategy for animals with simple brains and simple lifestyles. It doesn’t work well for humans, but brain evolution hasn’t caught up with cultural evolution. Also: the Buddhist influence on this book should be unusually obvious here. Buddhism holds that “attraction, aversion, and indifference” are the cause of all suffering. I think that’s an oversimplification, but insightful nonetheless.
• 5. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

If all meanings are fixed, then ambiguous meanings are not meaningful at all. To eternalism, any potential nebulosity of meaning looks like non-existence of meaning. Any morality that is not black-and-white is just immorality; any life-purpose that is not ordained in the Cosmic Plan is aimless wandering; any uncertainty about who you are is intolerable.

In other words, to eternalism, every other stance appears to be nihilism, more-or-less. Nihilism actually is harmful and wrong—eternalism is right about that. If nihilism were truly the only alternative, perhaps eternalism would be the least bad choice. That is a main part of its appeal.

When eternalism’s promises of certainty, understanding, and control are revealed as lies, nihilism looms. The promise to keep nihilism at bay is then eternalism’s final ploy.

Increasingly many Westerners have abandoned organized religion, but surprisingly few say they are atheists. They may say “I don’t believe in God, exactly, not as a person, but I believe in something—maybe you could say a higher power, or the universe as a whole, or maybe it’s love—it doesn’t really matter what you call it.”1

I think what they are trying to say is that they believe meaning is real; and I think they are right. Theirs is a relatively sophisticated stance: nihilism is wrong, and so are God-based religious systems. But it’s not true that, for meaning to be real, it has to be fixed in place by some other eternal ordering principle.

I will deliver good news: there is a third alternative that includes what’s right about both eternalistic religion and nihilism; avoids the errors of both; is conceptually coherent; and is workable as a way of life.

• 1. For instance, in a controversial interview, Oprah Winfrey told atheist Diana Nyad “I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder [of nature], and the mystery, then that is what God is. It’s not the bearded guy in the sky.”

Eternalism makes promises it can't keep. It lies about the things that are most important to us. It makes us do stupid, crazy, evil things. And we still love it and keep going back for more.

Eternalism seems so nice. It is hard to believe ill of it. Yet always it drops its victims in seething cauldrons of misery. The message of this entire book is: eternalism is bad;1 there is a better alternative. So, much of the book consists of warnings about eternalism’s harms. This page is an overview.

The harms are myriad. Some I have already discussed: troubles that flow from the promise of certainty, the illusion of understanding, and the fantasy of control. Some I will detail shortly, in the sections on eternalist ploys and non-theistic eternalisms. Many must be postponed to chapters on stances allied with eternalism, such as mission, true self, and ethical eternalism, each with harms specific to its dimension of meaningness.

Broadly, we might categorize harms as:

• Deliberate stupidity
• Emotional regression with an abusive, addictive dynamic
• Bad practical outcomes from unrealistic actions based on imaginary meanings
• Emotional pain from trying to conform to eternalism when it’s obviously not working
• Morally wrong decisions based on absolutist ethics

We are not stupid enough for eternalism

Eternalism comes naturally; human brains evolved to hallucinate meaning where there is none. Any other stance takes at least a little thought. Nihilism, especially, is difficult. It's only possible to maintain nihilism using sophisticated rationalizations that explain away obvious meaningfulness. Other, more complex stances depend on dubious metaphysical distinctions that take work to apply in concrete circumstances.

Nevertheless, eternalism is obviously wrong. Everyone can see that many events are completely meaningless, and the meanings even of important ones are often nebulous.

To maintain eternalism, you have to deliberately stupefy yourself. You need to damage your own natural intelligence to not-see nebulosity and to preserve illusions of meaningfulness and cosmic order. Starting on the next page, I'll explain various mind-killing ploys you can use to hide eternalism’s failures and lies.

Eternalism can provide bogus feelings of intelligence, from perceiving patterns that aren't there. This is the rush of excitement as the new convert to an eternalist system “discovers” that Mindfulness or Marx or Mormonism explains everything. Desire for meaning makes you willing to sabotage your critical ability, in order to accept preposterous stories in which the Cosmic Plan makes everything make sense. That inhibits curiosity and the natural drive to find a better understanding.

In the end, no one can make themselves stupid enough to accomplish eternalism—to maintain the stance at all times. Everyone, at times, does recognize nebulosity—and so moves into some other stance.

Eternalism is regressive and addictive

Eternalism is comforting, when life is going well enough. Then you can choose to ignore the ways reality fails to fit fixed meanings. Eternalism’s promises of hope and solace seem credible. You can live in a pastel fantasy world. So eternalism “works” as long you can maintain a childish, self-indulgent obliviousness—which is its characteristic emotional texture.

Maintaining eternalism requires emotional regression, into a toddler’s bedroom, watched over by a wise protecting parent: the Cosmic Plan, or some authority who poses as its representative. When you are unable to keep deluding yourself, you look for someone more powerful to do the job: someone or something that can affirm eternalism in the face of your perception of the contradictory evidence. The parent-figure promises to protect you from nebulosity. You choose this relationship specifically to obstruct emotional and intellectual growth when that seems too frightening.

Preserving comforting illusions may be psychologically valuable in the short run, in times of crisis: as antidotes to depression, anxiety, and despair. (Those are symptoms of nihilism, which may be the only accessible alternative to eternalism for some people.) In the longer run, this pain-killing function leads to helplessness and addiction.

As the opening paragraph of this page suggested, a relationship with eternalism may resemble addictive dynamics of domestic abuse, which keep a victim returning to the abuser. The victim believes—rightly or wrongly—that they are powerless, and that the abuser is powerful. The victim hopes that the abuser would act as a protector against the world, if properly propitiated. This requires the victim to delude themselves that the abuser has loving intentions, and that the abuse episodes are somehow be triggered by the victim’s inadequacy.

Eternalism has bad practical results

Eternalism promises eternally good feelings. And it is a comforting ride—until it crashes into reality and you get hurled from your seat onto the open highway.

Meanings have consequences. Meaning is not an autonomous domain, disconnected from practical reality; everyone frequently acts on the basis of perceived meanings. But those are often wrong. Eternalism says the world is good, and I am good, so if I choose to do something good, then the result must be good! But often it isn’t.

As we saw earlier, eternalism’s illusions of understanding and control fantasies often lead over-confidence, excess risk-taking, over-control, and other unrealistic patterns of action. Alternatively, the delusion that you must base action on the Cosmic Plan leads to paralysis when you are unable to discern what it demands. (This is particularly common in the stance of mission, which is closely related to eternalism.)

Acting based on imagined meanings frequently fails. Harm and pain ensue. Eternalism’s synthetic certainty ensures that this comes as a shock, each time. Each time, one experiences it as a betrayal. I am a good person; this wasn’t supposed to happen to me!

Then, disillusioned, you may exit eternalism into another stance. Alternatively, you may apply ploys to maintain eternalism—probably in an increasingly shaky, wavering form.

Wavering eternalism is emotionally painful

Eternalism persuades you that you should maintain the stance at all times. This has moral force; if you waver in your commitment, you are a bad person. However, it is impossible to accomplish consistent eternalism. This implies perpetual struggle, with shame and guilt at imperfection, and much wasted effort.

The wavering eternalist feels intense confusion during periods of doubt.

When eternalism fails, it tries to convince you that it’s your fault, for wavering, for not trying hard enough, for being unworthy of the Cosmic Plan. Then you may punish yourself—as harshly as you can, to demonstrate your renewed commitment. (The Cosmic Plan can’t punish you adequately; it doesn’t exist!)

As you repeatedly experience eternalism failing when it encounters nebulosity, you develop fear and loathing of ambiguity and change. You come to avoid areas of life that seem particularly nebulous. This progressively narrows your scope for action, leading to rigidity or even paralysis. You may isolate yourself socially: from everyone, or into a closed group that agrees to pretend eternalism works. You may adopt an aggressive hostility toward anyone who reminds you of nebulosity.

You may come to feel cramped and imprisoned in the small safe space where eternalism seems to function. Creativity and daring become impossible.

You somehow cannot find your true mission in life, for which eternalism would guarantee success. You neglect mundane goals as mere materialism, meaningless in the eyes of the eternal ordering principle. Most of the time, you cannot locate your true self; your miserable ego’s attempts to live up to its ideals are pathetic. Sometimes, you believe you have found your true self and mission, and go off on a fantastical ego-trip crusade, which needs constant confirmation from followers and eventually ends in catastrophe.

Eternalism is immoral

The eternal ordering principle is a cruel tyrant. The Cosmic Plan makes insane demands—and calls that morality. It sometimes commands harmful actions; it often fails to promote beneficial ones. Following its dictates causes damage to yourself and others.

Ethical issues are inescapably nebulous. Ethical eternalism blinds you to the complexity, ambiguity, and situatedness of moral decision-making. Taken seriously, it leads to moral absolutism and political extremism.

Religiosity promotes paranoia about contamination; blaming of victims; waste of resources and opportunities; and tribalist conflict.

• 1. Also, nihilism. Nihilism is bad too. But most people know that.

Eternalist ploys are ways of thinking, feeling, talking, and acting that stabilize the eternalist stance.

Eternalism is inherently unstable because it is obviously wrong and harmful. Yet it feels so good that one wants to find ways to maintain the stance. Ploys are ways to blind oneself to nebulosity and to trick oneself into finding meaning where there is none.

For example:

• Imposing fixed meanings is a way of thinking using artificial, prescribed categories
• Hope is a way of feeling that shifts imaginary meaning to the future, when the present is obviously meaningless
• Wistful certainty is a way of talking that asserts the presence of meaning where none can be found
• Purification is a way of acting that forces reality to conform to meaningful concepts

Each page in this section describes one eternalist ploy: how it works, and an example of the ploy in action. I explain how each causes harm, and an antidote to apply when you find yourself using the ploy and would rather not.

It is not so easy to see the casual, random occurrences of everyday life as meaningful; so individual eternalist ploys are usually not highly effective, or not for long. Typically we switch rapidly from one to the next, as the inadequacy of each becomes obvious. Or, we deploy several at once, hoping to overwhelm our intelligence with multiple spurious arguments.

Some ploys you are unlikely to use if you are not committed to eternalism. Others, everyone falls into sometimes, even when committed to nihilism or the complete stance (both of which reject eternalism).

You will find all of them familiar, either from personal use or from overhearing them used. Still, it may be useful to read the explicit analyses, because the concept of “eternalist ploys” may provide new insight into their operation.

The ploys are particularly easy to observe in religious fundamentalism and political extremism. Such systems use them in heavy-handed, clumsy ways, making them obvious. In this section, I mainly describe the ploys as methods for fooling yourself; but priests and politicians use them rhetorically to fool others too. Later in the book, I discuss eternalism as a route to social power.

Four groups of eternalist ploys

I have categorized the ploys into four groups.

• By definition, eternalism means seeing everything as meaningful—although most things aren’t. The first group of ploys hallucinate meanings where there are none.
• Many things are obviously meaningless, or have obviously nebulous meanings. The second groups of ploys blind you to meaninglessness and nebulosity.
• Sometimes it’s impossible not to perceive meaninglessness, and so all those ploys fail. The third group explains away meaninglessness.
• Finally, if meaninglessness cannot be explained away, you have to react in some way. The fourth group tries to cope with meaninglessness when it’s unavoidable.

Alternatively, the ploys could be grouped based on whether they are typically used in monist eternalism or dualist eternalism—or both. Most are used in both. However, smearing meaning around, magical thinking, and bafflement are particularly useful for monist eternalism. Similarly, fixed meanings, hiding from nebulosity, arming, and purification are particularly useful in dualist eternalism.

[I am unsure about my current list of ploys. They seem to overlap and run into each other somewhat, and I also expect I may find more of them. I may need to "refactor" the categories. Feedback about this would be welcome!

For now, I have provided unfinished versions of the pages describing the ploys. They are preliminary, incomplete drafts; I’ll come back and finish them when I’m more confident that overall scheme is correct. However, there should be enough explanation for each that you will understand how they work, and so can recognize them in operation.]

• 1. More precisely, magical thinking is belief in a causal connection without having an adequate epistemological basis. There are interesting borderline cases, such as nutritional “science”—which I write about later—for which the epistemological basis is contested. I am more skeptical of nutritional “science” than most people; and I also believe that it is heavily laden with covert moral claims, thereby attributing ethical meanings to food that it does not have. All this makes nutrition a fascinating contemporary example of eternalism, magical thinking, and the metastasis of ethics into domains where it has no legitimate business.

• 1. The Guru Papers provides much insight into the workings of eternalist social groups.

• 1. You could try dwile flonking.

• 1. According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel that watches over it and encourages it to grow. Isn’t that darling?

• 1. Counter-thoughts can also be applied positively, to direct oneself into a complete stance.

• 1. The worst sort of depravity involves aardvarks. Just so you know. The details can only be hinted at, of course. It’s probably best just to avoid aardvarks altogether.

Accomplishing eternalism would would mean always knowing the fixed meaning of everything, and acting accordingly. That is impossible, because there are no fixed meanings. It’s also not possible to completely blind yourself to nebulosity, and not possible to always give in to the insane demands of supposed fixed meanings.

Mainstream Christianity recognizes this, actually, with the doctrine of original sin. It is not possible for humans to avoid sin. Everyone is sometimes in conflict with eternal meaning.

Some eternalist religious sects (typically termed the “mystical” branches) claim that accomplishment is possible. You can perfectly unify your self with the Cosmic Plan while in this life. This usually implies monism, and I’ll discuss such mysticism in detail in the monist chapter of Meaningness.

Some eternalistic political ideologies claim that collective accomplishment is inevitable; history guarantees utopia, eventually. Some non-political eternalist progress ideologies (versions of transhumanism, for instance) also say that accomplishment is at least possible in principle.

When the promises of eternalism are revealed as lies, when the harm it does becomes impossible to overlook—you exit.

Exit is rarely dramatic. Eternalism is so wrong that you drop it frequently, in the moment—but adopt it again a minute later. Stances are extremely unstable, and hard to maintain for long. Even if you are committed to an eternalistic system (a religion, for example), you ignore its claims about meaning many times a day, when they contradict practical reality.

If you are committed to a particular confused stance, growing understanding of its defects may lead eventually to a dramatic “deconversion experience”—of leaving a religious or non-religious eternalist system, for example. This book is mostly not about that.1 It’s about the unnoticed moment-to-moment movements of meaningness.

Exiting eternalism implies adopting an alternative stance toward meaningness.2 The specific way eternalism breaks down in a particular situation guides you into another stance, which seems to offer a solution.

This book advocates moving from confused stances (such as eternalism) to the complete stance. The complete stance is relatively inaccessible, so this is difficult at first. Generally one is tossed from one confused stance to another, without even noticing, much less understanding. A first step toward accomplishing the complete stance is noticing the transitions between other stances. Becoming aware of movements among stances, and what triggers them, helps you understand the emotional dynamics of each. Learning to recognize the promises a stance makes, and reflecting on its repeated failure to deliver, kills the allure for you—and then you can escape its grip.

Where you may go next

Because eternalism is the simplest, most basic confused stance, you may transition from it to almost any other. Exiting one of the more specific stances, discussed later in the book, typically can lead to only a few others. I’ll discuss likely exit moves for each stance in the chapter about it. (The schematic overview of stances also lists the most likely next stances adopted when exiting each.)

From eternalism, there are three groups of stances you might move to: quasi-eternalistic stances, nihilism and quasi-nihilistic stances, and the complete stance.

The most closely allied stances are “circumscribed eternalisms.” These admit that some things are not meaningful, but insist on fixed meanings for others. For example, mission says that “mundane” purposes are meaningless, really, but insists that “eternal” purposes are ultimately meaningful. Such stances preserve much of the feeling-tone of eternalism. They are attractive when eternalism’s promises still seem generally plausible, but when its absolutism is obviously unworkable in a particular situation.

When a betrayal by eternalism leaves you feeling sick, nihilism or one of its allied stances may look more attractive. Outright nihilism is nearly impossible to maintain, but you can adopt it transiently. In the longer term, you might commit to some kind of Nihilism Lite, like materialism. Materialism (as I use the word in this book) is the stance that eternal purposes are meaningless, but mundane, material ones are real.

With practice, you can learn to avoid both these possibilities. Instead, when you notice you are in the eternalist stance—when you find yourself insisting on a fixed meaning—you can use that as a reminder to move to the complete stance.

Learning skillful exits

This book aims to provide methods for deliberately moving out of wrong, dysfunctional stances into accurate, functional ones. Mostly, people seem unaware of the dynamics I describe, and so get pushed around helplessly, from one confused stance to the next, when difficulties arise. Instead, you can use moments of breakdown as openings to move on deliberately—ideally, to the complete stance. Troubles with meaning are valuable if you are prepared to transition and know where best to head. That requires understanding how all the stances work: what makes the confused ones attractive, how they inevitably fail, and why the complete stance is better. This takes intellectual understanding, thorough emotional familiarity, and then skill developed through repetitive practice.

Overall, the method could be described as destabilizing confused stances and stabilizing the complete stance.

• Eternalism consists of denying nebulosity, so learning to recognize nebulosity is the general method for destabilizing the stance.
• Since eternalism’s appeal is the promise of certainty, understanding, and control, realizing that it cannot deliver those destabilizes it.3
• In the eternalist ploys section, I have also suggested antidotes for many more specific patterns of eternalist thinking, feeling, and action.
• Just exiting eternalism is insufficient, though, if that simply drops you into another confused stance. Each needs its own antidotes—discussed later in the book.
• The complete stance consists of acknowledging both nebulosity and pattern, so stabilizing it involves learning to appreciate mixtures of the two. That too must wait for later.

• 1. There are many books advocating leaving theistic eternalism for atheism. They overlap in content with this book—but mostly only with this chapter.
• 2. Could one take no stance at all? In some sense, the complete stance is that no-stance, because it does not limit meaningness in any way. That is what makes it “complete.” It allows meanings to be however they are, without metaphysical pre-commitment to their being one way or another.
• 3. Realizing also that limited knowledge, understanding, and control are possible is an antidote to nihilism.

Eternalism is the confused stance that everything has a definite meaning. The form of eternalism that is most obvious in the West is religion: supposedly, God makes everything meaningful. However, non-theistic eternalism may actually be more influential and more harmful.

Non-theistic eternalism has all the same defects as the religious varieties, but this is less well-known, and therefore harder to defend against. Freeing ourselves from theism is only a first step toward freeing ourselves from a host of ubiquitous, harmful, mistaken ideas about meaningness.

It is easy for atheists to feel smug and superior about our more accurate worldview. Yet we commonly slide into malign non-theistic eternalism, which is just as distorted, and causes just as much trouble, as religion.

It is always tempting to find some ultimate source of meaning. (Especially when it seems the only alternative would be nihilism.) That temptation leads directly to eternalism, with all the harm that entails.

Belief in the supernatural is harmful, but several modern eternalist systems are thoroughly naturalistic (or pretend to be, anyway). I believe it is not mainly supernaturalism that is harmful about religion, it is eternalism.

“Reason” was the first substitute proposed for God, back in the European Enlightenment, and it is still the most influential. Reason, after all, led us out of the nightmare of religion. What better to crown as the new ruler? It seems to make sense that the world would make sense—that there is a meaningful pattern to everything—and that, using rationality, we can discover it.

Clear thinking is always a good thing, but ideological concepts of rationality (or “Reason”) can distort it into an eternalism. Eternalist rationality has most of the same features as religion—the same attractions, harms, ploys, and antidotes. It cannot deliver on its shining promises, because the world doesn’t make complete sense. Reality is nebulous. Eternalist rationalism has to lie and cheat to hide that, and so commits violence against accurate perception.

Political ideologies can also substitute for religion. Meaning is mainly a social activity, and political theories claim to provide explanations for social interactions. Political ideologies say what the patterns of society are; what they mean; and what they should be. However, all social interaction is, in reality, nebulous. Therefore, political theories cannot deliver the utopias they promise. Reliably, instead, they deliver oppressive dystopias; sometimes, when taken sufficiently seriously, deliberate multi-megadeath catastrophes.

Among non-theistic eternalisms, I will analyze rationality and political ideology in some detail, running to several web pages each. However, I’ll also devote single pages to briefer coverage of eternalistic psychotherapeutic ideology, non-theistic Buddhist eternalism, and UFO cults.

Rationalist eternalism is the confused stance that there is a pattern to everything, that all patterns can be discovered by reasoning, and that they give everything meaning. The universe is reasonable, and so reason can master it. This stance is wrong and harmful, just as other eternalisms are.

Rationality, understood and used properly, is a good thing. In the everyday sense, it is wise to think clearly and to act sensibly. My criticism of rationalist eternalism does not reject reason for emotionalism, or for some sort of anti-rational spirituality. I think anti-rational stances are also wrong and harmful. (I’ll analyze their faults later, in the chapter on monism, and in the discussion of the anti-rationalism of the 1960s-80s countercultures.)

In addition to good common sense, there are technical methods of reasoning that can be importantly useful sometimes. I will criticize their misuse, but I value technical rationality itself.

My argument against eternalist rationality is that reasoning does not, in fact, provide explanations or meanings for everything. Reality is nebulous, so that is impossible.

The exaggerated claims of ideological rationality are obviously and undeniably false, and are predictably harmful—just as with all eternalism. Yet they are so attractive—to a certain sort of person—that they are also irresistible.

Rationality and the Big Three stance combinations

The actual basis for rationalistic distortion is not eternalism. The root distortion is dualism, as I use the term in this book. Dualism, in this sense, is the insistence on boundaries; that everything must be definitely this or that, and not vaguely in-between.

The methods of rationality require specific categories. If you keep in mind that all categories are partially-arbitrary, artificial constructions, and cannot fully capture reality, the distortions they create may not cause problems. Ideological rationality tries to force reality to fit categories—and that does not end well.

It might make better sense to postpone discussion of rationality into the chapter on dualism. However, ideological rationality is such an important form of eternalism that I want to cover it here.

You may recall that there are three main stance combinations: dualist eternalism, monist eternalism, and dualist nihilism. Monist eternalism is anti-rational, because rationality depends on specifics, and monism denies specifics.

Both eternalism and nihilism are compatible with rationalism, and in practice rationalists tend to swing between the two. Actually, everyone tends to swing between the two, but for rationalists the alternation is often extreme and violent. That’s because clear thinking easily reveals the defects in both eternalism and nihilism. I will cover nihilist rationalism (or rationalization) later. And I will return to rationalism for further analysis in the dualism chapter.

Methods of rationality

You may have little interest in the technical methods of rationality, because you believe you understand their limits and faults and harms. You might even be a bit smug about that—but if you don’t understand in detail how formal rationality works, you are probably partly mistaken. You are probably, without knowing it, under the sway of Romanticism—an anti-rational eternalist ideology that is just as bad. Also, you are missing out on a good thing.

The methods of rationality are powerfully useful, and everyone should learn them, I think. As with all power tools, such as chainsaws, you also need to learn suitable safety procedures. The problem with rationality is not that it is technical. The problem is not anything about the methods themselves. The problem is metaphysical claims about the power of the methods to explain the unexplainable.

The pages in this section are somewhat technical. They are meant mainly for those who know at least a little about methods of formal reasoning. My intention is to point out potential dangers (ways rationality can distort into eternalism) and antidotes (ways to avoid sliding toward eternalism, or to escape from it when you find you have fallen in).

Wrong-way reduction is a logical fallacy no one seems to have pointed out before.1 Regular people rarely make this error on their own. It’s common for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and theologians. The wrong-way reductions made by these professionals escape into the general culture, and cause trouble for everyone else.

A wrong-way reduction is emotionally attractive when you have a problem that is nebulous—complicated, messy, and ambiguous. A wrong-way reduction claims to replace that with a simple, tidy, clear-cut problem. What’s wrong is that the new problem is harder than your original one—or even impossible! For a wrong-way reduction to seem useful, you must ignore this, and take the possibility of solving the new problem as a matter of faith.

The next page explains that most or all eternalist systems depend on wrong-way reductions. Eternalism denies nebulosity, and tries to use wrong-way reduction as a way to sweep nebulosity under the rug.

This is particularly common and obvious in rationalist eternalism. I will explore several examples in following pages, including logicism, Bayesianism, and utilitarianism.

Reduction, the right way

One problem reduces to another if the second problem is easier, and a solution for the second is most of a solution for the first.2

An informal example: Suppose you want to get from your home in rural California to Athens, Georgia. There are many ways you could do that, some harder than others. Most of this problem can be solved by taking an airplane from San Francisco to Atlanta. This leaves only the easier problems of getting to and from the airports. What’s “reduced” here is the difficulty of the journey.

A more technical example (which you can skip): the best way to find the least common multiple of two numbers is to reduce the problem to finding their greatest common denominator. For two numbers x and y, LCM(x, y) = x ⨉ y ÷ GCD(x, y). There are efficient ways to find the GCD. There are other ways to find the LCM, but they are less efficient than finding the GCD and multiplying.

Reduction, the wrong way

A wrong-way reduction transforms an easier problem into a harder one.

An example: Suppose you want to predict the outcome of a sportsball game. One approach would be to try to predict the number of goals that will be scored by each team. Then you could simply compare the two numbers to see which is greater.

This reduction goes the wrong way, because it is much easier to predict who will win the game than to predict exact scores.

Metaphysically motivated wrong-way reductions

Why would anyone make this sort of mistake?

If you wrongly believe that the second problem is easier than the first, this is not a logical fallacy. It’s an honest error of fact.

However, wrong-way reductions are often motivated errors, driven by wrong metaphysical attitudes. Often wrong-way reductions are advocated by people who know that the second problem is harder—or even impossible!

Wrong-way reductions are usually motivated by eternalism, the denial of nebulosity. Eternalists are unwilling to accept the inherent messiness, ambiguity, and uncertainty of life. Eternalists try to turn messy, ambiguous, and uncertain (but workable) problems into tidy, clear, certain ones—even when those are entirely insoluble.

Here’s an example. Divine command ethics turns the difficult problem of choosing how to act into the impossible problem of knowing God’s will. Ethics gets messy when different ethical considerations point in different directions in a single situation. Then it may appear that God has given contradictory instructions. How then to resolve the ambiguity? Honest theologians admit—when pushed hard enough—that it may be impossible to know what God wants then.

To cope with the cognitive dissonance of relying on the impossible to cope with the merely difficult, eternalists produce evasions, obfuscations, and denials. These boil down to an “if”: if we knew what God wanted, then that would be a simple, infallible guide to correct action. The fact that we don’t know gets passed over quickly, hoping you won’t notice.

This example is slightly contrived, mainly because divine command ethics has so many other defects that knowing God’s will gets barely mentioned in discussions of this ethical approach. I chose it because it’s so simple and so obviously unworkable.

The next several pages explore more sophisticated, non-theistic examples of the same pattern.

• 1. This seems odd. Have I missed something?
• 2. Here I am using “reduction” as it is used in mathematics, not as it is used in the philosophy of science. The other sense of “reduction” involves explaining a material phenomenon in terms of an understanding about another, “lower level” one. Most scientific reductions are not mathematical ones.

The marriage of empiricism and rationality

Mainstream epistemology—the theory of how we can know things—has two principles: empiricism and rationality. “Empiricism” means that knowledge is based on perception; “rationality” means that knowledge is based on sound reasoning.

Not so long ago, there were believed to be other bases for reliable knowledge: tradition, scripture, and intuition. All five of these competed with each of the others. So rationalists and empiricists were enemies, and it seemed both could not be right. However, in the late 1800s, rationalism and empiricism allied, and killed the other three. The two joined in the holy matrimony of the Scientific Worldview.

This marriage seems happy enough. Indeed, it’s obvious to any working scientist that both are indispensable. It is little-noticed that no contract was drawn up, and the terms of the union are undefined. Perhaps this is a motivated ignorance; why risk upset?

Dropping the flowery metaphors: we have no coherent explanation for how rationality and empiricism relate to each other—even though philosophers have worked hard to find one for several centuries. I find this mysterious and exciting, because I suspect that neither rationality nor empiricism is a good account of knowledge, separately or combined. That opens the possibility for alternative, more accurate explanations.

That is a big topic. This page concentrates on one small aspect: the relationships among mathematical logic, probability theory, and rationality in general. (A terminological point: confusingly, reasoning and empiricism are now often referred to together as “rationality.”) Mathematical logic is the modern, formal version of rationality in the narrow sense, and probability theory is the modern, formal version of empiricism.

It is sometimes said that probability theory extends mathematical logic from dealing with just “true” and “false” to a continuous scale of uncertainty. Some have said that this is proven by Cox’s Theorem. These are both misunderstandings, as I’ll explain below. In short: logic is capable of expressing complex relationships among different objects, and probability theory is not.

A more serious corollary misunderstanding is that probability theory is a complete theory of formal rationality; or even of rationality in general; or even of epistemology.

In fact, logic can do things probability theory can’t. However, despite much hard work, no known formalism completely unifies the two! Even at the mathematical level, the marriage of rationality and empiricism has never been fully consummated.

Furthermore, probability theory plus logic cannot exhaust rationality—much less add up to a complete epistemology. I’ll end with a very handwavey sketch of how we might make progress toward one.

Plan

I hope to dispel misunderstandings by comparing the expressive power of three formal systems. In reverse order:

• Predicate calculus—the usual meaning of “logic”—can describe relationships among multiple objects.
• Aristotelian logic can describe only the properties of a single object.
• Propositional calculus cannot talk about objects at all.

Probability theory can be viewed as an extension of propositional calculus. Propositional calculus is described as “a logic,” for historical reasons, but it is not what is usually meant by “logic.”

Cox’s Theorem concerns only propositional calculus. Further, it was well-known long before Cox that probability theory does extend propositional calculus.

Informally, probability theory can extend Aristotelian logic as well. This is usually unproblematic in practice, although it squicks logicians a bit.

Probability theory by itself cannot express relationships among multiple objects, as predicate calculus (i.e. “logic”) can. The two systems are typically combined in scientific practice. In specific cases, this is intuitive and unproblematic. In general, it is difficult and an open research area.

These misunderstandings probably originate with E. T. Jaynes. More about that toward the end of this page.

“Expressive power” is about what a system allows you to say. A possible objection to probability theory as an account of rationality is that it is too expensive to compute with. This essay is not about that problem. Even if all computation were free, probability theory could not reason about relationships, because it can’t even represent them.1

Propositional calculus

Propositional calculus is the mathematics of “and,” “or,” and “not.” (“Calculus” here has nothing to do with the common meaning of “calculus” as the mathematics of continuous change: derivatives and integrals.) There is not much to say about “and,” “or,” and “not,” and not much you can do with them. (You can skip to the next section if you know this stuff.)

A “proposition,” for propositional calculus, is something that is either true or false. As far as this system is concerned, there is nothing more to a proposition than that. Particularly, propositional calculus is never concerned with what a proposition is about. It is only concerned with what happens when you combine propositions with “and,” “or,” and “not.” It symbolizes these three with ∧, ∨, and ¬, respectively.

So let’s consider some particular proposition, which we’ll call p. All we can say about it is that it is either true or false. Regarding ¬, we can say that if p is true, then ¬p is false. Also, if p is false, then ¬p is true. Thus endeth the disquisition upon negation. (Perhaps you are not enthralled so far.)

Consider two propositions, p and q. If both p and q are true, then p∧q is true. If either of them is false, then p∧q is false. (Surprised?) That’s all that can be said about ∧.

You’ll be shocked to learn that if either p or q is true, then p∨q is true; but if both of them are false, then p∨q is false.

From these profound insights, we can prove some important theorems. For example, it can be shown that p∧¬p is false, regardless of whether p is true or false. (You may wish to check this carefully.)

Likewise, it can be shown that p∨¬p is true, regardless of whether p is true or false. In other exciting news, it turns out that p∧p is true if p is true, and false if not. Moreover, p∧q is true if, and only if, q∧p is true!

There are a half dozen banalities of this sort in total; and they exhaust the expressive power of propositional calculus.

Propositional calculus and “logic”

Propositional calculus is extremely important; it’s the rock bottom foundation for all of mathematics. But by itself, it’s also extremely weak. It’s useful to understand only for its role in more powerful systems.

Propositional calculus can’t talk about anything. As far as it knows, propositions are just true or false; they have no meaning beyond that.

The grade school example of logic is this syllogism:

We can capture the “therefore” in propositional calculus.2 Its symbol is →. It turns out that p→q is equivalent to (¬p)∨q. (You may need to think that through if you aren’t familiar with it. Consider each of the cases of p and q being true and false. If p is true, then ¬p is false, so q has to be true to make (¬p)∨q true. If p isn’t true, then ¬p is true, and then it doesn’t matter whether q is true or false.)

So we could try to write the syllogism, in propositional calculus, as (a∧b)→c. But this is not a valid deduction in propositional calculus. As far as it knows, a, b, and c are all independent, because it has no idea what any of them mean. The fact that a and b are both about men, and b and c are both about Socrates, is beyond the system’s ken.

For this calculus, propositions are “atomic” or “opaque.” You aren’t allowed to look at their internal structure. Propositional calculus has no numbers; no individuals, no properties, no relationships; nothing except true, false, and, or, and not. Most important, it has no way of reasoning from generalizations (“all men are mortal”) to specifics (“Socrates is mortal”).3

For historical reasons, propositional calculus is described as “a logic,” and is sometimes called “propositional logic.” But it is not what mathematicians or philosophers mean when they talk about “logic.” They mean predicate calculus, a different and immensely more powerful system.

Probability theory extends propositional calculus

Probability theory can easily be seen as an extension of propositional calculus to deal with uncertainty. In fact, the axiomatic foundations of the two were developed in concert, in the mid–1800s, by Boole and Venn among others. It was obvious then that the two are closely linked.

This section sketches the way probability theory extends propositional calculus, in case you are unfamiliar with the point. You can skip ahead if you already know this.

Probabilities are numbers from 0 to 1, where 1 means “certainly yes,” 0 means “certainly no,” and numbers in between represent degrees of uncertainty. When probability theory is applied in the real world, probabilities are assigned to various sorts of things, like hypotheses and events; but the math doesn’t specify that. As far as the math is concerned, there are just various thingies that have probabilities, and it has nothing to say about the thingies themselves. Just as in propositional calculus, probability theory doesn’t let you “look inside” them. In fact, one common way of applying probability theory is to say that the thingies are, indeed, propositions.

An event is something that either happens, or doesn’t. If e is an event, we symbolize its probability as P(e). We can symbolize the other possibility—that e doesn’t happen—as ¬e. It is certain that either e or ¬e will happen, so P(e) + P(¬e) = 1. Rearranging, P(¬e) = 1 – P(e). If e is certain, then P(e) = 1, so P(¬e) = 0, i.e. certainly false.

Suppose f is another event, which can happen only if e doesn’t happen. For example, if e is a die coming up 3, and f is the die coming up 4, then they are mutually exclusive. In that case, P(e∨f), the probability that the die comes up either 3 or 4, is P(e)+P(f). (For a six-sided die, that is 1/6+1/6=1/3.)

Suppose two events are “independent”: approximately, there is no causal connection between them. For example, two dice rolling should not affect each other. Let’s say e is the first die coming up 3, and g is the second one coming up 3. In that case, the probability that they will both come up 3, P(e∧g) = P(e) × P(g), which is 1/6 × 1/6 = 1/36.4

What is the probability that at least one die comes up 3? These are not mutually exclusive, so it is not simply the sum. It is P(e∨g) = P(e) + P(g) – P(e∧g), or 1/3 – 1/36. “At least one” includes “both,” and we have to subtract that out.

So, taken together, we see a simple and intuitive connection between probability and the operations of propositional calculus.

Cox’s Theorem

Cox’s Theorem concerns this relationship between propositional calculus and probability theory. It is irrelevant to the question “does probability theory extend logic” because:

1. Propositional calculus is not “logic” as that is usually understood.
2. It was well-known for decades before Cox that probability theory does extend propositional calculus.5

So you can probably just skip the rest of this section. However, since some people have misunderstood Cox’s Theorem as proving that probability theory includes all of logic, and is therefore a complete theory of rationality, I’ll say a little more about it.

Cox’s Theorem was an attempt to answer the informal question: Is there something like probability theory, but not quite the same?

This sort of question is often paradigm-breaking in mathematics. Is there something like Euclid’s geometry, but not quite the same? Yes, there are non-Euclidian geometries; and they turn out to be the mathematical key to Einsteinian relativity. Are there things that are like real numbers but not quite the same? Yes; complex numbers, for example, which have endless applications in pure mathematics, physics, and engineering.

So if there were something like probability theory, but not the same, we’d want to know about it. It might be extremely useful, in unexpected ways. Or, it might just be a mathematical curiosity.

Alternatively, if we knew that there is nothing similar to probability theory, then we’d have more confidence that using it is justified. We know probability theory often gives good results; if there’s nothing else like it, then we don’t have to worry that some other method would give better ones.

To answer the question, we need to say precisely what “like” would mean. (Probate law is “like” probability theory in some ways, but not ones we care about.) One approach is to define “what probability theory is like”; and then we can ask “are there other things that are like that?” So, what properties of probability theory are important enough that anything “like” it ought to have them?

This is not a mathematical question; it’s just a matter of opinion. Different people have different, reasonable opinions about what’s important about probability theory. The answer to “is there anything else like probability theory?” comes out differently depending on what properties you think something else would have to have to count as “like.”

When Cox was writing, in the 1940s, definitely nothing “like” probability theory was known. So he wanted to prove that indeed this would remain true.

Probably everyone would agree that anything “like” probability theory has to be a method for reasoning about uncertainty. So Cox started by asking: what would everyone intuitively agree has to be true about any sane method? For one thing, everyone would agree that in cases of certainty, any method ought to accord with propositional calculus; and that in cases of near-certainty, it ought to nearly accord. So, for instance, if q is nearly certain, then q∨p should also be nearly certain.

So Cox’s plan was to start with a handful of such intuitions, and show that probability theory is the only system that satisfies them. And, he thought he had done that.

Unfortunately, there are technical, philosophical, and practical problems with his result. I will mention some of these, but only briefly—because the whole topic is irrelevant to my point.

Technically, Cox’s proof was simply wrong, and the “Theorem” as stated is not true. Various technical fixes have been proposed, yielding revised, accurate theorems with similar content.

Philosophically, it is unclear that all his requirements were intuitive. For example, the proof requires negation to be a twice-differentiable function. Some authors do not consider twice-differentiability an “intuitive” property of negation; others do.

It is also controversial what the (fixed-up) mathematical result means philosophically. Whereas in 1946, when Cox published his Theorem, there clearly was nothing else like probability theory, there are now a variety of related mathematical systems for reasoning about uncertainty.

These share a common motivation. Probability theory doesn’t work when you have inadequate information. Implicitly, it demands that you always have complete confidence in your probability estimate,6 like maybe 0.5279371, whereas in fact often you just have no clue. Or you might say “well, it seems the probability is at least 0.3, and not more than 0.8, but any guess more definite than that would be meaningless.”

So various systems try to capture this intuition: sometimes a specific numerical probability is unavailable, but you can still do some reasoning anyway. These systems coincide with probability theory in cases where you are confident of your probability estimate, and extend it to handle cases where you aren’t.

Some advocates of probability theory point to Cox’s Theorem as reason to dismiss alternatives. Is that justified? It is not a mathematical reason; the alternatives are valid as mathematical systems. It’s a philosophical claim that depends on intuitions that reasonable people disagree about.

Practically, what we want to know is: are there times when we should use one of the alternatives, instead of probability theory?

This is an empirical, engineering question, not a mathematical one. I have no expertise in this area, but from casual reading, the answer seems to be “no.” Successful applications seem to be rare or non-existent. When probability theory doesn’t work, the other leading brands don’t work either. They just add complexity.

So in a practical sense, I think Cox was probably right. As far as we know, there’s nothing similar to probability theory that’s also useful in practice.7

Using probability in the real world

Probability theory is just math; but we care about it because it’s useful when applied to real-world problems. Originally, for example, it was developed to analyze gambling games.

Suppose you roll a die, and you believe it is fair. Then you believe that the probability it will come up as a three is 1/6. You could write this as P(3) = 1/6.

People write things like that all the time, and it is totally legitimate. It might make you slightly uneasy, however. 3 is a number. It’s abstract. Do numbers have probabilities? Not as such. You assign 3 a probability, in this particular context. In a different context—for example, rolling an icosahedral die—it would have a different probability.

There is always a process of intelligent interpretation between a mathematical statement and the real world. This interpretation gives mathematics “aboutness.” What, in the real world, do the mathematical entities refer to? Here, you understand that “3” corresponds to whether a die has come up three or not.

This interpretation is not merely mental; it is a bodily process of action and perception. You have learned to roll a die in a way that makes its outcome sufficiently random8; and you can count the number of pips on a die face.9 The usefulness of any mathematics depends on such interpretive processes working reliably.

“3” is ambiguous, as we saw. In this simple case, you know what it refers to, and won’t get confused. But someone else might read your observation that “P(3) = 1/6” and try to apply it to an icosahedral die; in which case they might make bad bets. So when communicating with others, or in more complicated cases where you might lose track yourself, you would want to be more explicit.

What exactly did “P(3) = 1/6” mean? Maybe it’s “this particular die, now rolling, has probability 1/6 of coming up with a three.” Or maybe you have a more general belief: “any fair six-sided die has probability 1/6 of coming up three any time it is rolled.” So then, to avoid ambiguity, you could write:

This has a high ratio of English to math, however. English is notoriously ambiguous. Quite possibly there’s still room for misinterpretation. It might be better to write this in a way that is purely mathematical, so there’s no ambiguity left.

Modern mathematical logic was developed as a way to do exactly that. Logicians wanted a systematic way of turning English statements into unambiguous mathematical ones. The system they invented is called predicate calculus.

It is now the meta-language of mathematics. All math can (in principle) be expressed in predicate calculus. It is immensely more powerful than propositional calculus. Its key trick—which is necessary to express generalizations like “any six-sided die”—is called logical quantification.

But before we get to that, let’s look at a simpler system, Aristotelian logic; and look at how probability theory can more-or-less handle Aristotelian generalization.

Implicit generalizations

Aristotelian logic allows us to make general statements about the properties of particular, single objects. The standard example is “all men are mortal.” The Aristotelian syllogism allows us to reason from general to specific statements. For example, if we know that Socrates is a specific man, then we can conclude that Socrates is mortal.

How does this relate to probability theory? “All men are mortal” is usually considered certain, so it’s not a good example for answering that.

Instead: the logician C. L. Dodgson demonstrated that some snarks—not all—are boojums. A probabilist may write this generalization as a conditional probability:

The vertical bar | is read “given”. The statement is understood as something like “if you see a snark, the probability that it is a boojum is 0.4.” Or, “the probability of boojumness given snarkness is 0.4.”

Mathematicians would call this “an abuse of notation”; but if it is interpreted intelligently in context, it’s unproblematic. Still, it’s rather queer. What exactly are “snark” and “boojum” supposed to mean here?

A probability textbook will tell you that the things that get probabilities are events or hypotheses or outcomes or propositions. (Different authors disagree.) We could legitimately say

because “Edward is a snark” is a proposition. But this is a specific fact, and we want to express a generalization about snarks broadly.

“Snark” and “boojum” refer to categories, or properties; and those don’t get probabilities. In this context, they are meant to be read as something like “this thing is a snark” (or boojum). A more pedantically correct statement would be:

But again this doesn’t look like math; and what does “this” mean?10 How are we sure that the “something” that is a snark refers to the same thing as the “it” that might be a boojum? Someone might read this, observe that Carlotta is a snark, and conclude that there’s a 0.4 probability that Edward is a boojum. That is not a deduction the equation was supposed to allow. We’re depending on intelligent interpretation. We’ll see that this could become arbitrarily difficult, and therefore unreliable, in more complex cases.

Formally, a Bayesian network is a set of specific conditional probabilities. In practice, by abuse of notation and intelligent application, it is used to express a set of generalizations. For example:

Implicitly, “hairy,” “snark,” “boojum,” and “lethal” are all meant to refer to the same creature—whichever that happens to be in the situation at hand.

So long as this implicit reference works out, probability theory can in practice capture Aristotelian logic: generalizations about properties of a single object.11 Mathematical formulations of probability theory don’t support that, but there’s usually no practical problem.

However, Aristotelian logic is weak; it doesn’t let you talk about relationships among objects. Let’s shine some light on an example.

There’s other scary monsters out there. Grues, for example. If you explore a cave in the dark, you are likely to be eaten by one.

This example is different. “Cave” does not refer to the same thing as “grue”! Again, with intelligent interpretation, this may not be a problem. The statements were intended to mean something like:

English is carrying too much of the load here, however. It’s someone’s job to keep track of grues and caves and “I”s and make sure they are all in the right relationships. The conditional probability formalism is not able to do that.12

Logical quantification

Predicate calculus has an elegant, general way of talking about relationships: logical quantifiers. They are the solution here.

A simplest use cleans up the vagueness of “P(boojum|snark) = 0.4.” We’re supposed to interpret that as: anything that is a snark has probability 0.4 of being a boojum. In predicate calculus,

“∀” is read “for all,” and the thing that comes after it is a place holder variable that could stand for anything. So this means “for anything at all—call it x—the probability that x is a boojum, given that x is snark, is 0.4.”

So ∀ is doing two pieces of work for us. One is that it lets us make an explicitly general statement. “P(boojum|snark) = 0.4” was implicitly meant to apply to all monsters, but that worked only “by abuse of notation”; you can’t actually do that in formal probability theory.

∀’s second trick is to allow us to reason from generalities to specifics—the Aristotelian syllogism. This is done by “binding” the variable x to a particular value, such as Edward. From

we are allowed to logically deduce

(This operation is called “instantiation” of the general statement.)

There are two logical quantifiers, ∀ and ∃. The second one gets read “there exists.” For example,

“There exists some x such that x is Edward’s father”—or, more naturally, “Something is Edward’s father,” or “Edward has a father.”

The power of predicate calculus comes when we combine two or more quantifiers in a single statement, one nested inside another.13 Because each quantifier has its own variable, we can use them to relate two or more things.

Fatherhood is a relationship. Every vertebrate has a father.14

From this, if we also know that Edward is a vertebrate, we can deduce that he has a father.15

Probably, every vertebrate has exactly one father:

“If x is a vertebrate, then it has some father (y), and if anything (z) is x’s father, it’s actually just y.”

Do you believe that? I was sure of it until I thought a bit. If two sperm fertilize an egg at almost the same instant, maybe it’s possible (if very unlikely) that during the first mitosis, the excess paternal chromosomes will get randomly dumped, leaving daughter cells with a normal karyotype composed of a mixture of chromosomes from the two fathers. For all I know, this does happen occasionally in fish or something. Or maybe it just can’t happen, because vertebrate eggs have a reliable mechanism to detect a wrong karyotype, and abort.16

We’d like to bring evidence to bear—evidence that (like all real-world evidence) cannot be certain. Suppose we sequence DNA from some monsters and find that it sure looks like Arthur and Harold are both fathers of Edward:

This should update our belief that every vertebrate has only one father. How?

Here we would be reasoning from specifics to generalities (whereas the implicit instantiation trick of Bayesian networks allows us to reason from generalities to specifics). This is outside the scope of probability theory.

Statistical inference is based on probability theory, and enables reasoning from specifics to generalities in some cases. It is not just probability theory, though; and it handles only simple, restricted cases; and it doesn’t relate to predicate calculus in any straightforward way.

Back to the cave:

“If a person (x) is in a cave (y), then the probability that there’s a grue (z) near the person is 0.8.” Most of what is going on this statement is predicate logic, not probability. Remember that for probability theory, propositions are opaque and atomic. As far as it is concerned, “person(x) ∧ cave(y) ∧ in(x, y)” is just a long name for an event that is either observed or not; and so likewise “∃z: grue(z) ∧ near(z,x).” It can’t “look inside” to see that we’re talking about three different things and their relationships.

In practice, probability theory is often combined with other mathematical methods (such as predicate logic in this case). Probabilists mostly don’t even notice they are doing this. When they use logic, they do so informally and intuitively.

The danger is that they imagine probability theory is doing the work, when in fact something else is doing the heavy lifting. This can lead to logical errors. That is common in scientific practice: the probabilistic part of the reasoning is carried out correctly, but it is “misapplied.” In routine science, “probabilistic reasoning” is usually “we ran this statistics program.” “Misapplied” means that the program was run correctly, but due to a logical error, the results don’t imply what the users thought.

Another danger is sometimes-dramatic over-estimation of what probability theory is capable of. The mistaken idea that “probability theory generalizes logic”17 led to some badly confused work in artificial intelligence, for instance. More importantly, it has also warped some accounts of the philosophy of science.

Probabilistic logic

Probability theory can’t help you reason about relationships, and that is certainly an important part of rationality. So, probability theory is not a complete theory of rationality—one of the main points of this essay.

Predicate calculus can help you reason about relationships; but by itself, it can’t help you reason about evidence. Probability, in the Bayesian interpretation, is a theory of evidence. Can we combine them to get a complete theory of rationality?

“∀x: P(boojum(x)|snark(x)) = 0.4” is a statement of predicate calculus—not probability theory. As written, it is either true or false. But, maybe you aren’t sure which! In that case, you may have a probability estimate for it. And you might want to update your probability estimate given evidence.

“Given the observations that Edward is both a snark and a boojum, I now think it’s 0.8 probable that the statement ‘the probability that any snark is a boojum is 0.4’ is true.”

What exactly would that mean? How would you use it? What would that say about the probability of a particular snark being a boojum? What happens in the 0.2 probability that the statement is not true? In that case, what does it say about the probability of a particular snark being a boojum? Suppose the probability is actually 0.400001, not 0.4? Does that make the statement false?

The formula freely mixes probability theory with predicate calculus, nesting them any-which-way. There’s a P inside the scope of a ∀ inside the scope of a P. How does that work?

It turns out that, in general, no one yet has an answer to this. The field of probabilistic logic concerns the question. So far, various restricted probabilistic logics have been studied, which do not allow freely mixing probabilities and logical quantifiers. Even these restricted versions can get extremely complicated, and a general theory is currently out of reach.18

Formal systems, rationality, and epistemology

Even if we could fully integrate probability theory and predicate calculus, together they would be far from a complete theory of rationality. They have no account of what the various bits of notation mean, and where they come from. What is “father,” and how did you come up with the idea that ∀x: vertebrate(x) → (∃y: father(y, x)) even might be true?

Logical positivism was the dream that by writing things out precisely enough, in enough detail, we could get answers to such questions. It conclusively failed. The problem is that formalism necessarily depends on intelligent interpretation-in-action to connect it with the real world; to give it “aboutness.”19

Formal systems (such as logic and probability theory) are also only useful once you have a model. Where do those come from? I think it’s important to go about finding models in a rational way—but formal rationality has nothing to offer. (I wrote about this in “How to think real good.”)

As a further point, a complete theory of rationality—if such a thing were possible—would probably not be a complete theory of epistemology. We have very little idea what a good epistemological theory might look like, but my guess is that rationality (even in the broadest sense) would be only a small part.

Since we don’t know how people know things (the subject of epistemology), we should try to find out—empirically, and rationally! Armchair speculation has been seriously misleading. (Basing epistemology on an over-simplified fairy-tale version of Newton’s discovery of gravitation—a popular starting point—is not an empirical or rational approach, and reliably fails.) We need to actually observe people using knowledge, finding knowledge, creating knowledge. Only after much observation could we develop and test hypotheses.

In the 1980s, the “social studies of science” research program began to do this. Unfortunately, much of that was postmodern nonsense. It was marred by metaphysical and political axes that many of its practitioners wanted to grind, plus lack of understanding of the subject matter in most cases. This led to the “Science Wars” of the 1990s, culminating in the Sokal hoax, which pretty nearly killed off the field.

But this program did some valuable observational work, and made some interesting preliminary hypotheses. I’d like to see a return to careful observational study of how science (and other knowledge-generating activities) are done—this time without the ideological baggage.

Here’s one valuable generalization that came out of “social studies of science.” As I pointed out earlier, mathematical formulae are only given “aboutness” by people’s skilled, interpretive application in practical activity. The same is true of knowledge in general!

Further, most human activity is collaborative. It turns out that sometimes what I know cannot be separated from other people’s ability to make sense of it in relationship with particular situations. Making sense of knowing requires an account of the division of epistemic labor. Knowledge is often not a property of isolated individuals.20

Taking these points seriously leads to radical revisions not only in the sorts of explanations that could plausibly be part of an adequate epistemology, but also in the sorts of things it would need to explain.

Historical appendix: Where did the confusion come from?

E. T. Jaynes’ Probability Theory: The Logic of Science appears to be the root source. He was completely confused about the relationship between probability theory and logic.21 There’s strong evidence that when people tried to de-confuse him, he pig-headedly refused to listen.

He wrote that probability theory forms the “uniquely valid principles of logic in general” (p. xx); and:

Our theme is simply: Probability Theory as Extended Logic. The new perception amounts to the recognition that the mathematical rules of probability theory are not merely rules for calculating frequencies of “random variables”; they are also the unique consistent rules for conducting inference (i.e. plausible reasoning) of any kind. (p. xxii)

This is simply false, as I’ve explained in this essay. How did he go wrong?

He got confused by the word “Aristotelian”—or more exactly by the word “non-Aristotelian.”

Aristotelian logic has two truth values, namely “true” and “false.” In the 1930s, there was a vogue for “non-Aristotelian logic,” which added other truth values. For example, a statement could be “meaningless” rather than either true or false. Non-Aristotelian logic turned out to be a dead end, and is a mostly-forgotten historical curiosity.

Predicate calculus is not Aristotelian logic, but it is not “non-Aristotelian”, either! It has only two truth values.

What’s confusing is that Aristotelian logic was extended in two different dimensions: by adding truth values (to produce non-Aristotelian logic) and by allowing nested quantifiers (to produce predicate calculus).

When someone tried to explain to Jaynes that probability theory only extends Aristotelian logic, not predicate calculus, he remembered the phrase “non-Aristotelian logic” and read about that, and (rightly) concluded it was irrelevant to his project. Then when the someone said “no, you missed the point, what matters is predicate calculus,” Jaynes just dug in his heels and refused to take that seriously.

There are several places in his book where he says this explicitly. There’s a long discussion in the section titled “Nitpicking” (p. 23). It’s an amazing expression of defiantly obstinate confusion. Well worth examining to learn linguistic signs that you are refusing to see the obvious: out of arrogance, or because you half-realize that accepting it would collapse your grandiose Theory Of Everything.

There’s another refusal on page xxviii:

Although our concern with the nature of logical inference leads us to discuss many of the same issues, our language differs greatly from the stilted jargon of logicians and philosophers. There are no linguistic tricks and there is no “meta-language” gobbledygook; only plain English. … No further clarity would be achieved … with ‘What do you mean by “exists”?’

Predicate calculus is the standard “meta-language” for mathematics, and getting clear about what “exists” means was Frege’s central insight that made that possible.22

Jaynes is just saying “I don’t understand this, so it must all be nonsense.”

A Socratic dialog

Pop Bayesian (PB): Wow, I have a faster-than-light starship! [A complete theory of rationality.]

Me: That seems extremely unlikely… how does it work?

PB: It’s about five inches long and has pointy bits at one end. Look!

Me: That’s a fork. [That’s a minor generalization of propositional calculus.]

PB: No, it’s totally an FTL starship! [A complete theory of rationality!]

Me: No, it’s not.

PB: Yes it is!

Me: Look, a minimum requirement for an FTL starship is that it go faster than light. [A minimum requirement for a general theory of rationality is that it can do everything predicate calculus and everything probability theory can do.]

PB: Yeah, look! I can make it go way fast! *Throws the fork across the room, really hard.*

Me: Uh… I don’t think you understand how fast light goes [how much more powerful predicate logic is than propositional logic].

PB: I can make it go however fast! I could shoot it out of a gun, even!

Me: Um, you don’t seem to know enough physics to understand the in-principle reason you can’t accelerate ordinary objects to FTL speeds. [If you can mistake probability theory for a general theory of rationality, you must be missing the mathematical background which you’d need in order to understand why it’s a non-starter.]

After writing this, I found a delightful, similar satire of Bayesianism by Cosma Shalizi, "Solvitur ambulando."

• 1. Predicate calculus is still more computationally expensive; in fact, it is provably arbitrarily expensive. I’m not advocating it as a general engineering approach to rationality either.
• 2. Or maybe not. Since propositional calculus does not let you talk about anything, its “therefore” really isn’t the same as a common-sense “therefore.” Some people think this is important, but it’s not relevant to this essay, so let’s move on.
• 3. E. T. Jaynes did not understand this. He was badly confused here already. He failed to understand the relationship between propositional and Aristotelian logic, much less the more complicated relationship between Aristotelian and predicate logic. In Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, p. 4, he claims to explain what a syllogism is, but his explanation is actually of modus ponens! Modus ponens is an operation of propositional logic, whereas the syllogism requires Aristotelian logic, i.e. a single universal quantifier. Jaynes did not see the distinction between the two; a very basic error.
• 4. If the events are not independent, it’s still possible to calculate probabilities, but more complicated.
• 5. In fact, Cox pointed this out in his 1961 book The Algebra of Probable Inference, quoting Boole in Footnote 5, p. 101. In this passage, Boole not only makes the connection between the frequentist and logical interpretations of probability, he suggests that it is necessary—which is the point of Cox’s Theorem.
• 6. In the Bayesian interpretation, anyway.
• 7. An important exception is quantum mechanics, which can be seen as an extension of probability theory in which probabilities can be negative or complex numbers. (Thanks to John Costello (@joxn) for pointing this out.) It is not “like” probability theory in Cox’s sense, and not useful as a way of reasoning about macroscopic uncertainty, but is of great practical (engineering) and theoretical (physics) importance.
• 8. This might seem obvious, but small children can’t do it reliably.
• 9. Or, more accurately, you can subitize them.
• 10. Technically, “this” is an indexical. Mid–20th-century logicians realized that indexicals allow for implicit universal quantification—when combined with some method for instantiating, or determining the reference of, each indexical. They didn’t have much of a story about the method. One of the central innovations of the Pengi system I built with Phil Agre was using (simulated) machine vision to bind indexicals to real-world objects.
• 11. Technically, this is not exactly what “Aristotelian logic” means; I’m skipping some fiddly details that are only of historical interest, and not relevant to this discussion.
• 12. Here “I” and “that” are indexicals, which give implicit quantification, but “some” is an explicit quantifier. An explicit formalization of this situation requires nested quantification, and you can’t get that with just indexicals, even implicitly.
• 13. An accurate account of nested quantification was the key to modern logic. It was developed by Gottlob Frege. To quote Wikipedia: “In effect, Frege invented axiomatic predicate logic, in large part thanks to his invention of quantified variables, which eventually became ubiquitous in mathematics and logic, and which solved the problem of multiple generality. Previous logic had dealt with the logical constants and, or, not, and some and all, but iterations of these operations, especially ‘some’ and ‘all’, were little understood: even the distinction between a sentence like ‘every boy loves some girl’ and ‘some girl is loved by every boy’ could be represented only very artificially, whereas Frege’s formalism had no difficulty… A frequently noted example is that that Aristotle’s logic is unable to represent mathematical statements like Euclid’s theorem, a fundamental statement of number theory that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Frege’s ‘conceptual notation’ however can represent such inferences.”
• 14. Let’s simplify this to natural, biological fatherhood, ignoring issues of legal parenthood and laboratory genetic manipulation.
• 15. Formally, we bind x to Edward and instantiate to get vertebrate(Edward) → (∃y: father(y, Edward)), and then apply modus ponens (implication elimination) to get ∃y: father(y, Edward).
• 16. A few months after writing this, I learned about Tremblay’s salamander, an all-female species with no fathers. They are triploid, and reproduce only by self-fertilization. I read about Tremblay’s salamander in Randall Monroe’s What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions which is full of fascinating factoids of this sort.
• 17. It’s worth noting that whereas most of what you can do with logic, you can’t do with probability theory, everything you can do with probability theory, you can do with predicate calculus. You can easily axiomatize probability theory, and thereby embed the whole thing in predicate calculus.
• 18. I find this somewhat surprising, actually, and have been tempted to dive in and see if I can solve the problem. But, looking at some examples of reasoning about probabilities of probabilities helps one see, quite quickly, why this is hard. It’s difficult to know what they mean. Interestingly, Jaynes worked on this, developing a formalism he called A_p, which I’ve discussed elsewhere. A_p handles only the very simplest cases (and is probably unworkable in practice for even those), but it does give some insight.
• 19. Wittgenstein, who was partly responsible for logical positivism in the first place, diagnosed this failure clearly in his Philosophical Investigations. Heidegger presented much the same insight earlier in Being and Time, although not as clearly, and not with reference to logical positivism specifically.
• 20. This means that the representational theory of mind, which descends from logical positivism, is unworkable. See “A billion tiny spooks.”
• 21. He was heavily influenced by Cox’s work, which he entirely misunderstood. Cox was definitely not confused, and not to blame; he was explicit that he was discussing only the propositional calculus. Cox’s writing is delightfully informal; if you already know logic, his book is enormously entertaining. If you don’t know logic, the informality is liable to mislead you.
• 22. Part of the obstacle to understanding nested quantifiers had been Aristotle’s misunderstanding of the existential quantifier even by itself. If you want to geek out about the history of logic, you can read about this in “The Square of Opposition.”

This is about the harm done by ideologically-distorted concepts of rationality. I wrote it in 1988. My main example came from nutrition. However, the actual subject, by satirical analogy, was cognitive “science,” which I discussed only briefly at the end. Cognitive science was doubly distorted by rationality: it pretended to be rational itself, and also modeled people as rational in ways they aren’t.

I find little to disagree with now, so I’m republishing the text here unaltered. However, I’m following it up with newly-written pages discussing the subsequent evolution of cognitive “science” into neuro-“science,” which inherited some defects; and the growing public realization that nutrition “science” has failed catastrophically.

Introduction

This is an essay about scientism:1 the special social power given to people and discourses that cast themselves as “scientific.” It examines a particular case, “domestic science,” which is now plainly bogus. Thereby it tries to illuminate, and to cast as bogus, other cases (such as “cognitive science”) currently accepted as legitimate.

My theoretical framework here relies heavily on Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality. This book is better titled in the French edition: The Will to Knowledge. It takes sex as a concrete example, but is actually concerned with the relationship between knowledge and power.

My concrete example is drawn from Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. Shapiro’s book is a history of the “domestic science” movement. Domestic science was founded in the late nineteenth century as, simultaneously, an intellectual discipline and a reform movement, both directed at the improvement of cooking. In its later manifestation as “home economics,” it had an overwhelming effect on women’s lives that has abated only partly in the last twenty years.2

Domestic science provides a neat illustration for the pathologies of intellectualized rationality, authoritative knowledge, and transcendence. Here at the end of the twentieth century, it seems mostly absurd to think that science has anything much to say about cooking,3 and we thus have a degree of distance on a particular manifestation of a group of connected twistednesses that still dominate the way we think about most things.

Authoritative Recipes

Domestic science, like everything that calls itself a “science”, presented itself as a field of intellectual endeavor. Intellectual fields are supposed ideally to be “detached.” However, the domestic scientists primarily pursued a practical project: reforming the way Americans cooked. To this end, they amassed vast power, as was inevitably necessary to radically change the lives of tens of millions of people. They pursued a particular route to this power, one which has become extremely important in contemporary society: the validation of discourse.

We are accustomed to thinking of power inhering in institutions and political roles. In fact, as Foucault first pointed out, most power in the modern world lies in discourse: in the control of knowledge. However, these sorts of power are synergistic, and the domestic scientists were able to accumulate considerable institutional power:

Then they quickly assembled all the appurtenances necessary to a full-fledged profession: syllabi for course work at every level, degree-granting programs of study, a professional organization, a journal, and annual meetings. … they could now join forces with institutions that might help them solidify their position. Home economics easily won a place in industry, education, and government… and the arrangement satisfied everyone concerned. (pp. 7–8)4

This institutional power, however, was useful not so much because it gave domestic scientists the ability to directly control other people’s actions, but because it validated and gave authority to their discourse.

Knowledge is power only when it is accepted as authoritative. A discourse is validated as authoritative when it is established that any of a class of questions is to be answered in terms of that discourse. In this case, domestic science established itself as the discourse in terms of which any serious question about food would have to be answered. The process of establishing institutional validation for a body of discourse is a crucial part of assembling power-through-control-of-knowledge. We can see it happening all around us now; it is clearly visible, for example, in the extraordinary political success of connectionism, whose modus operandi is neatly described by the paragraph quoted above.

Once a group has established their knowledge as authoritative, anyone who has direct power is forced to consult them, if only as an ass-covering maneuver.

Domestic scientists were being sought not only as teachers but as experts, and in the field of institutional feeding their participation became especially prominent. Many were invited to examine the diets of hospital patients, prisoners, asylum inmates, college students, and other groups subjected to quantity cooking on a small budget, and to make recommendations for improving the nutritional quality of food at the lowest cost. After their disillusioning experience with the mass of poor and working people [who insisted on eating food that tasted good], Mrs. Richards and her colleagues welcomed the opportunity to work with these more captive populations. (p. 161)

Much of the rest of my essay is concerned with just how the validation of domestic science was achieved. What about a body of discourse makes it easy to render authoritative? In our culture, the best strategy is to cast the discourse as a “Science.” This strategy has been followed, with varying degrees of success, by Domestic Science, Library Science, Astrological Science, Materials Science, Agricultural Science, Political Science, Sanitation Science, Dental Science, Management Science, and Cognitive Science. The strategy involves smearing a particular sort of rhetoric over the subject matter and the performance of a variety of meaningless but culturally valorized rituals involving the invocation of such deities as “precision” and “repeatability,” scientific-looking tools, and the use of numbers whenever possible. The goal is to make the actual practices of the group resemble those of physicists as nearly as possible.

Scientific Food

At the time domestic science was at its height only two things were actually known about food: that different foods had different energy densities (measurable in calories per ounce) and that food was made up of varying proportions of protein, carbohydrate, and fat. Nothing more would be learned until the discovery of the vitamins two decades later. This did not stop domestic scientists from proposing that every housewife be taught considerable amounts of any science that seemed potentially relevant, including, for example, psychology, physiology, bacteriology, and chemistry (p. 65).

If the housekeeper could be made to think of herself as a scientist, calmly at work over the beakers and burners in her laboratory, then every meal would emerge as she planned, pristine and invariable. (p. 86)

Science genuinely relevant to food had yet to be invented. So domestic scientists applied irrelevant science, and prescribed scientific-seeming rituals to be adhered to when cooking. For instance, a science is supposed to involve experiments, and demands that these experiments be repeatable. The rhetoric of domestic science equates cooking with laboratory experimentation:

…an enthusiastic social reformer in the domestic-science movement complained … that “even the intelligent housekeeper still talks about ‘luck with her sponge cake.’ Luck! There is no such word in science, and to make sponge cake is a scientific process!” (p. 86)

One of the hallmarks of science is measuring things.

Exact measurement was the foundation for everything else that happened in the scientific kitchen, although there was not always agreement about how to reach exactitude. (p. 115)

Domestic science invented standardized measures for food in the 1880s. The cup was standardized as a half-pint at this point, for instance.

[Fannie] Farmer’s interest in exact measurements went far beyond cups and spoons, however: she liked to specify that strips of pimento used for decoration be cut three-quarters of an inch long and half an inch wide, and she could measure out spices by the grain. (p. 116)

Other things that could be measured were all the basic chemical properties of food. Energy density is still considered relevant, but very few of the others are; except in a few extreme cases, the pH of foods is irrelevant. However,

“Chemical analysis should be the guide for the cookery book,” she urged, and looked forward gladly to the day when a laboratory microscope would be standard equipment in every kitchen. (p. 130)

Some domestic scientists advocated that every kitchen include complete equipment for quantitative chemical analysis.

Science is big on charts and graphs, and domestic scientists rose to the challenge. Shapiro shows, for instance, a “Cupcake chart” with a huge matrix of numerical entries, and describes a “meal chart” in which

…protein, carbohydrate, and fat were distributed with an exactitude that demanded kitchen scales, a ruler, and some arithmetic. Atop two rolls, for example (combined weight, two ounces; cost, two cents; percent protein .170; calories, 163), the man was permitted to spread a one-inch cube of butter (weight, one ounce; cost, two and a quarter cents; percent protein, none; calories, 224)… What eluded her scrutiny, however, was the nature of the food itself. To balance a meal by numbers alone, ignoring taste and texture, meant that creamed potatoes, creamed vegetable soup, macaroni with cream sauce, salad with creamy dressing, and gelatin with cream were all listed on the menu for Day Two, along with stewed prunes, stewed corn, and stewed tomatoes. (p. 209)

Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of this was the “Dietary Computer” (no kidding) invented by Ellen Swallow Richards, who was the first woman graduate of and first woman instructor at (of course!) MIT.5

Meal plans were justified in terms of the process of digestion, or rather the process as it was understood.

The meal began with a clear soup, which Mrs. Rorer planned specifically for its lack of nutritive properties. The stomach was supposed to simply rest on the soup, gathering strength, as she explained it, “before the heavy work of digesting a spare rib.” Applesauce accompanied the spare rib, the acid countering the fat, according to rule… (p. 80)

…the chewing required by salted almonds would increase the circulation of blood. In this way a good supply of blood would be furnished to the stomach… (p. 81)

What I find most interesting in all this is that the domestic scientists knew that their understanding of nutrition was very incomplete, but they did not hesitate to make prescriptions for action based on them that determined the way Americans ate for more than half a century. What little genuine understanding they had did not support these prescriptions. For instance, they could measure energy density. By itself, though, energy density tells you nothing about how to cook. So they made the arbitrary assumption that more was better, and used as much sugar and fat as possible (p. 76). To this assumption can probably be credited tens of millions of deaths from heart disease.

Many of the variables on which the domestic scientists’ prescriptions were based, such as pH, seem now to us to be irrelevant, and others that we consider central couldn’t be measured and so did not enter into the prescriptions. Since vitamins had not been discovered, domestic scientists were not big on fruits or vegetables, which didn’t have much protein, carbohydrate, or fat in them, and mostly seemed to be water.

Domestic scientists assumed that the ratios of protein, carbohydrate, and fat were relevant variables, and based diet plans on theories of the “correct” ratios. “Nutrition scientists” are still doing this, and so far as I can tell they still don’t know what the “correct” ratios are, because every five years they confidently declare that they have discovered with complete certainty that we should have twenty-three percent or thirty-seven percent or seventeen percent protein in our diets, and American eating habits obediently shift accordingly. Most likely there are no “correct” ratios, because lots of other variables are involved.

Rational Cookery

The cult of science is part of the cult of rationality. By “rationality” here I mean rationality as an intellectualized prescriptive ideal. Ultimately, it is by presenting a discourse as rational that it is validated. Presenting it as scientific is one means to this end. Rationality requires other rhetoric and ritual practices, not strictly scientific, which we can see in operation in domestic science.

Rationality mandates control.

…color-coordinated meals… represented most of all the achievement of an extraordinary degree of control over the messy, unpredictable business of the kitchen. (p. 84)

Rationality demands that practice accord to formal rules.

Rather than learning to consult their instincts, their sense of taste, or their imaginations, fledgling cooks were taught to depend on rules, which existed on a lofty plane far above the pleasures of appetite. (p. 90)

Rationality prescribes certainty.

The extraordinary degree of predictability that was the triumph of mass-produced food had been sought for years by laboratory-based scientific cooks, and its achievement represented the fulfillment of one of the major goals of domestic science: the attainment of certainty. An ever-sturdier sense of finitude, objectivity, and perfect control could now be discerned in recipes and meal plans… (p. 206)

Rationality requires “objectivity,” or distance from the subject matter. The ideal was a “carefully maintained impersonality between the cook and the food” (p. 211). This is accomplished, in part, by abstract representation.

Sometimes, in fact, it was possible for a cooking teacher to strip away so much of what she considered extraneous to the process of cookery that the remainder could be reduced to a chart, itself a stunning acknowledgement of the now frozen distance that separated the cook from the food. (p. 206)

Rationality promotes generalizations, even when these do great violence to the phenomena.

Studying the diets of black tenant farmers in Alabama, then, the investigators noted that women and children often worked in the fields alongside the men, but since there was no way according to the method to take that work into consideration, or to assign nutritional needs to it, they decided for convenience sake to assume that it didn’t exist. (p. 167)

One participant at the fourth Lake Placid conference had taken an informal poll of twenty-two families to find out what they ate, and the results distressed her. Although there was a great deal of repetition in the daily menus within each household, she told her colleagues, the variety from house to house was dizzying. Evidently “local tastes and family idiosyncrasies” still exerted a powerful influence over the dinner table, preventing the development of “conscious standards” in meal planning. … “It is true that all people do not demand the same kind of food. This is due sometimes to acquired appetites, sometimes due to finicalities of appetite due to bad living and sometimes to the fact that people have not enough other interests besides that in eating and drinking.” When people advance to the stage of what she called “rational living” … they would find that “unreasonable preferences for particular foods” disappeared. (pp. 213–214)

Observing the meticulous rituals of rationality is the high road to status in our culture.

… these [completely bogus] dietary investigations helped boost domestic scientists to a new height of self-respect. The clean and precise task of gathering information for scientific analysis could not possibly be confused with cooking, much less eating, and the institutional backing of the federal government gave the work an orderliness and a magnitude that surpassed their most ambitious reveries. To have acknowledged individual quirks like pregnancy or child labor would only have interrupted the smooth operation of the intellectual machinery, and dragged down the whole process into a slough of those idiosyncratic emotional responses traditionally called female. (p. 167)

Rationality worship is central to many, perhaps most, of the twistednesses of our culture. I should like to say a lot more about this here, but the topic is too large. I think you can imagine that if we analyzed most other parts of contemporary culture we would find them shot through with the same disease we find here in cooking. I would very much like to study the way in which rationality worship, a form of institutionalized insanity, gives rise to both individual and group twistedness.

Transcending Physicality

No matter how modern, civilized, rational, and scientific we are, some activities remind us that we have somehow failed to escape being animals; bodies; physical objects. Eating is one. Thus, we eat in ritualized ways that try to deny, as much as possible, that it is a necessary bodily process. The bestiality of eating is enhanced by the fact that what we eat is other living things. I occasionally suddenly realize that the thing I am putting in my mouth is a part cut out of the sexual organ of a plant which sat around outdoors, rested on earth, got rained on, had bugs wander over it, and pumped sap around inside itself, and am momentarily horrified and disgusted. One of the great goals, and eventually triumphant successes, of domestic science was to disguise the bodily nature of food.

Most authorities recommended one to three hours’ boiling for string beans, forty-five minutes for asparagus, twenty minutes for cucumbers, half an hour for celery, and up to twelve hours for beets. … Salad greens, which did have to be served raw and crisp, demanded more complicated measures. The object of scientific salad making was to subdue the raw greens until they bore as little resemblance as possible to their natural state. … One cook recommended cutting lettuce leaves into “ribbons of uniform width” for a more orderly arrangement, and the most popular version of a spinach salad required the spinach to be boiled, drained, chopped, molded into little cups, unmolded, and decorated with a neat slice of hardboiled egg. (p. 96)

The physicality of food makes it disagreeable not only to eat but also to cook.

Handling food, she emphasized in a letter in a letter to Atkinson, was “distasteful to women” … [meat in particular] cannot be handled without disgust. (p. 151)

Various devices were invented to avoid the necessity of actually touching food while cooking it: the chafing dish, mechanical bread kneaders, and a device known as the Aladdin Oven, for example.

Food, ideally, ought to be stripped of concrete properties; those properties it retains should be as pure and abstract as possible. This ideal was triumphantly realized in the development of products like Cheez-Whiz and Jell-O, which have no texture, pure primary colors, and no identifiable source in the natural world. Kool-Whip additionally has an elemental flavor, being simply sweet. Crisco, then, is the ultimate food product, having no texture, color, or flavor; a food so abstract it is easy to forget that it is coarsely physical, and to imagine that it resides rather in the realm of Platonic forms, side by side with cylindric algebras and cohomology groups.

This attempt to deny physicality is a central theme in our culture, one closely connected with that of rationality.

Domestic Science is to Food as Cognitive Science is to People

It seems now to us ludicrous that science should have much to say about cooking, yet this was accepted without question in our parents’ generation. It is now accepted without question that science has a great deal to say about “cognition.” And our views of what sort of things we are, and a great many institutional policies, are shaped by what “cognitive scientists” say about us. Cognitive science is twisted by rationality worship twice: as with other sciences, it twists its own methods to conform to rationality’s dictates, but it also reads rationality into its own subject matter, casting people as rational.

To make my analogy explicit, cognitive scientists, like domestic ones, are wont to apply irrelevant branches of science, smear empty mathematics over the phenomena, make absurd generalizations from variables they can measure while neglecting anything they can’t, adopt outward trappings of physicists even when they are inappropriate, constantly engage in meaningless “scientific” rituals, and make confident policy recommendations (e.g. concerning education) based on what they know to be extremely incomplete understandings. As rational beings, they both seek for themselves and impute to their subject matter control, practice according to formal rules, certain knowledge, objectivity, abstract representation, and generalization.

Seeing the absurdity of these practices in domestic science should make cognitive science also look absurd. I think it likely that “cognitive science” will seem as much of an anachronistic oxymoron in thirty years time as “domestic science” does now.

Just as cooking is slowly recovering from domestic science, our understanding of ourselves will slowly recover after cognitive science is discredited.

Epilogue, 2014

It has been more than a quarter century since I wrote that. What progress have we made? Has food recovered from domestic science? Has our understanding of ourselves recovered from cognitive science? I’ll address those questions in the following pages.

Oh, and if you were wondering about the title, “Perfection Salad” is a bizarre “scientific” dish that would now be unrecognizable as food, but was popular as late as the 1960s. There’s a picture and recipe here.

• 1. Nowadays people argue about how “scientism” should be defined, in order to promote their particular ideologies of what counts as rational, and therefore what bodies of knowledge should be granted authoritative social power. That wasn’t true in 1988, or anyway I was unaware of it. In 2014, I'm not interested in arguing about what scientism “really means” or should mean; the covert power-grab in that kind of argument is partly what this essay is about!
• 2. I.e. starting around 1968, twenty years before I wrote this.
• 3. Alas, a quarter-century later, “science” is still claiming authority over food, with results that have probably been catastrophic. I discuss that in the follow-up.
• 4. All page numbers are from the first (1986) edition. I haven’t read the second (2008) one.
• 5. Despite my poking fun at her here, she had an impressive career and seems to have been overall a Good Thing.

We screwed up. We failed completely.

We may have killed millions of people. We’re really, really sorry about that. However:

Our most important message to you today is: we know absolutely nothing about nutrition. Our field is intellectually bankrupt.

What’s worse, we have no clue how to find out anything about nutrition.

The only conclusion we can draw, from decades of elaborate and extremely expensive research, is that our research methods don’t work.

Admittedly, in retrospect, many of us were incompetent, were biased or outright corrupted by power interests, or pursued personal food ideologies that had no basis in data. However, even our largest, most careful studies, funded by neutral parties and run by our best scientists, gave only equivocal results.

We’d totally understand if you never want to have anything to do with us again. There’s no reason you should listen to anything we have to say. However, we do have two requests.

1. We’re pretty darn sure no one else knows anything about nutrition, either. Please don’t listen to “alternative” nutrition quacks. We’ve been there, and we know.
2. Obviously, there’s no point doing any more nutrition research for the foreseeable future. It would just be more of the same. However, we’d like to ask that some of the nutrition research budget be redirected into meta-nutritional research: to try to understand why we failed, and if there are other methods that might work.
3. Please eat a healthy, balanced diet.¹

Signed,

[Every nutritionist in the world]

^1. Just kidding!

Dear nutrition professionals,

Apparently, you are clueless. You have no idea what your jobs are.

As your employers, we thought we were hiring people with more than two neurons, who could figure out the obvious without having it spelled out completely literally. But no.

Your job is to wear white lab coats while saying that food ingredients are healthy and unhealthy, and to wave charts around. That makes the ingredients authoritatively healthy and unhealthy, which covers our asses.

Some of us have to feed something to school children. Parents demand that school lunches be “healthy.” What does that mean? You don’t know, and we don’t care. What matters is that when parents sue the school district, we can point at you waving charts around. “See! Science! Science says it’s healthy! Go away!”

Some of us have to sell breakfast pastries. Consumers demand that their breakfast be “healthy.” We know you have no idea what that means, because for every ingredient on our master list of industrial food components, you have said it was good one year and bad the next. We made up our own chart, you know? Three columns: ingredient, study that proves it causes cancer, study that proves it prevents cancer. Our food engineers make pastries out of whatever optimizes cost and shelf life, and then the marketing department pastes “Coreopsis free! Now with added chelicerates!” on it. That’s what makes a healthy breakfast pastry.

Some of us make most of what everyone eats: high fructose corn syrup, soy oil, and wheat flour. Just one of our companies sold $81 billion of that stuff last year. It has been authoritatively proven to be healthy. By Science. By you.

Go back to work. Your resignations are hereby rejected. If you refuse to continue waving confusing charts around, we will hire other people who are less fussy. There will be nutritionists; we don’t care whether or not they are you.

Signed,

[The governments of every country in the world, the agriculture industry, the food processing industry, the supermarket industry, and so forth.]

More than a quarter century ago, in “Perfection Salad,” I wrote: “It now seems ludicrous that science should have much to say about cooking… cooking is slowly recovering from ‘domestic science’.” In the 2014 epilogue, I asked: “Has food recovered from domestic science?”

• “Domestic science” was rebranded as “nutrition science,” with all the same pathologies. That has yielded zero reliable knowledge.
• Despite complete ignorance, nutrition “science” issued and enforced confident recommendations that may have been responsible for millions of premature deaths, plus great loss of health and quality of life.
• Meanwhile, industry has developed considerable genuine science of food—oriented to optimizing commercial ends, rather than health and tastiness.
• Partial public awareness of these problems has produced a proliferation of pseudoscientific, quasi-religious food subcultures.
• Passionate belief in mythical meanings of food probably have a evolutionary origin.
• Recently, some pundits have started to suspect that—as I suggested in 1988—no one knows what makes food healthy. Perhaps now the public can begin to resist all claims to authoritative food-knowledge.

Food, eternalism, scientism, and pseudoscience

Nutrition ideologies rest on the eternalist ploy I call “wistful certainty”:

There must be a correct diet; there must be a rational way to discover it

There’s no reason to believe either of those; indeed, there’s strong evidence against each of them.1 The power of wistful certainty comes from the unspoken alternative: “otherwise, we would have no control over our health, Science would fail, and the world would be hostile and unfair and we might as well just give in to hopeless nihilism.”

This ploy underlies both obviously silly New Age nutrition pseudoscience and authoritative state-endorsed nutrition pseudoscience.

What makes you call nutrition “pseudoscience?” That seems like a wild claim. It’s true that it has failed repeatedly, but isn’t that the way science works? We can’t demand certainty; science can only say what is most likely based on the available evidence. It’s true that a lot of studies have been done badly, but that doesn’t invalidate the best work; it just means we need to insist on better experimental methods.

There is always uncertainty in science, but real science gradually establishes some stable facts; it eventually strongly supports some theories and conclusively dismisses others. It is typical of pseudoscience that it does not progress.

Nutrition has made no progress. It has discovered no stable facts. Everything nutritionists have said, they have said the opposite ten or twenty years later (if not much sooner). They literally know nothing.2 After a century of countless experiments, the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed—the optimal ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate—is completely unsolved. If they can’t figure that out, anything more sophisticated seems hopeless.

Nutrition is now both scientism and pseudoscience. This is a somewhat rare combination; cognitive science is another example, as I pointed out in “Perfection Salad.” Scientism—the eternalistic distortion of science into an authoritative source of meaning—is most harmful when the science is bogus. Pseudoscience is most harmful when it gets the support of the state and other powerful institutions. Food and theories of the mind probably both strongly affect human well-being, so they are particularly bad subjects to have turned into scientism or pseudoscience.

My point is not that nutrition is bad science. Unquestionably, it is bad science; a competent statistician, looking at the design of most experiments, will immediately say “this is meaningless; you can’t learn anything this way.”

It’s worse than just incompetence, in two ways. First, as the “resignation letter” noted, even the best studies have been useless. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong, such that doing the same sort of science better wouldn’t help.

The second, still worse implication is that worthless pseudoscience can get treated as authoritative for a century, and even now. This is partly due to rationalist eternalism, and partly due to institutional imperatives produced by malign social dynamics.

In which “Science” kills a few million people

Just when I wrote “Perfection Salad,” in the mid–80s, nutrition had its greatest breakthrough. “Scientists” “discovered” that fat (especially saturated fat, and doubly especially cholesterol) was the cause of the two biggest causes of death in rich countries: cardiovascular disease and cancer.3 Cardiovascular disease is caused by fat (especially cholesterol) accumulating in blood vessels. So, obviously, eating less fat will prevent cardiovascular disease. Cancer is caused by oxygen free radicals chemically modifying fat into a form that attacks DNA, creating mutations, so obviously if you eat less fat, that happens less.4 Besides, fat has twice as many calories as protein or carbohydrate, so obviously if you eat less fat, you won’t get unhealthily overweight.

There was virtually no actual evidence for any of this, but it made sense. (“It makes sense!” is the rationalist basis for all pseudoscience.) “Obviously, it’s urgent that Americans be protected from cardiovascular disease and cancer, so waiting for conclusive evidence before sounding the alarm would be irresponsible.”

A massive public “education” campaign followed. Perhaps astonishingly, in response, Americans dutifully drastically decreased their fat intake (especially cholesterol). This followed the pattern I described in 1988:

Domestic scientists assumed that the ratios of protein, carbohydrate, and fat were relevant variables, and based diet plans on theories of the “correct” ratios. “Nutrition scientists” are still doing this, and so far as I can tell they still don’t know what the “correct” ratios are, because every five years they confidently declare that they have discovered with complete certainty that we should have twenty-three percent or thirty-seven percent or seventeen percent protein in our diets, and American eating habits obediently shift accordingly. Most likely there are no “correct” ratios, because lots of other variables are involved.

An epidemic of obesity began just around the time this “education” campaign began. Health outcomes have been awful. It seems likely that low-fat diet advice actually caused the diseases it was supposed to prevent.5 In any case, most studies concluded that dietary cholesterol does not increase blood cholesterol and does not cause cardiovascular disease; and the saturated fat evidence varies between weak, zero, and counter to the low-fat theory.

Some people started pointing this out more than a decade ago,6 and it’s now nearly the mainstream view. However, nutritional authorities aren’t quite ready to admit to killing a few million people with their bad advice.

In the aftermath of failure

As of early 2015, the establishment is trying to figure out how to retract their anti-fat advice, while doing as little damage as possible to their reputation. They are sending up various waffly trial balloons, experimenting with PR strategies.

Saving nutrition’s reputation is a matter of self-interest. Also, many in the field are probably just too stupid to realize the magnitude of their failure, and honestly assume that somehow Science must know something.

However, more sophisticated players seem to be thinking:

Admitting outright that we were wrong could discredit nutrition permanently—or even Science as a whole. Even though we know nothing now, with better Science, we’ll probably discover the truth soon. It’s critical to preserve respect until then, so people will listen when we get it right. Otherwise, they’ll fall prey to New Age woo and commercial quack diet faddery.

You can hear this in the background of the waffling. I think it is too late; the public is already losing trust.

There’s another problem: if the advice is not anti-fat, what can it be? Some in the field seem to be trying to establish a new consensus, organizing to make anti-sugar the new message. This would take us back to the 1960s–70s, when sugar was the Big Bad. Maybe it is. Who knows? I’m reasonably sure nutritionists don’t.

Another PR strategy has been to blame wrong dietary recommendations on corruption, due to industrial influence. Probably corruption has, indeed, been a significant factor. However, this is a typical example of the eternalist strategy of explaining away failure as due to extraneous factors, which preserves the illusion of present and future competence.

Why has nutrition science failed? At this point, we can’t know. I believe that all available nutrition research funding should be redirected to answering that question. In the mean time, I’ll speculate:

• It may not matter what you eat. For example, Ioannidis has recently argued that reported nutritional effect sizes must be grossly overstated, and diet may not have a significant effect on health after all. On the other hand, the observation that peoples become much less healthy when they start eating Western food does suggest that diet is significant. However, this might be due to simultaneous adoption of some other, as-yet unidentified harmful aspects of the Western lifestyle.
• It may be that what makes a healthy diet is so different for different people (due to different genetics and/or lifestyles) that experiments done on mixed populations are meaningless. (I think this is relatively unlikely, for evolutionary reasons, but worth pursuing as a possibility.)
• An intriguing possibility is that what you eat matters, but not for you. Until recently, all nutritional research assumed that dietary effects worked via human metabolism. Recent studies suggest that gut bacteria play an important role in human health, and that diet affects them much more than it affects human cells. If this is right, biochemical studies of diet have been looking at irrelevant factors for the past century. (I hope this is right, because it might lead to rapid progress, and also because it’s funny.)

Reverse regulatory capture

Honest nutrition scientists would, as in my satirical “resignation letter,” admit that the field has failed, they know nothing, and they cannot now give any meaningful recommendations. I think this would actually be more likely to preserve public trust, in the long run, than the current attempts at waffling and bluffing and muddling. The field is probably too cowardly for honesty, though. The emperor now realizes he has been seen parading naked, but will pretend not to know, to save face.

Anyway, as the “rejection” reply letter explains, institutional imperatives make it impossible to admit ignorance. There will be nutritional recommendations, even if every nutritionist has to be fired in order to create them. Governments, and the food industry, cannot accept that nothing is known, because they would no longer have any basis for their institutional policies. They do not care much what the policies are; but it is critical that they exist.

Initially “domestic science” captured regulators;7 but then state institutions captured nutritional “science.” Once it was established that there were authoritative facts-of-the-matter about what people should eat, state institutions (schools, prisons, the military) needed stable, simple, crisp guidelines about what they were allowed to feed people. For school administrators, it doesn’t matter what the nutritional theory is, but it is critical that there be an authoritative theory they can demonstrate conformity to, in order to remain blameless. So the power here is mainly in the authority-giving power of rationalistic discourse, not in the institutions (much less individuals).

The processed food revolution

In 1988, most American meals were still cooked from scratch. Now that’s rare. Nearly all American food is the product of intensive industrial engineering systems. These rely on new, genuine food science—about how to reliably extrude optimized food-like products, not about what is healthy or (for the most part) tasty. The capture of food by rationality is therefore essentially complete; but it is rationality optimizing for ends we might not choose.

Since we don’t actually know anything about nutrition, it’s impossible to know whether the new engineered food products are unhealthy. From the food industry’s point of view, uncertainty is good, because nowadays any food can be labelled with multiple supposedly-beneficial qualities, according to assorted competing theories (probably none of which have any relationship to reality).8

The obesity epidemic suggests something has gone badly wrong with the Western diet, in which case it must have something to do with processed food, just because nearly all food is now processed.

One of the trial new messages being tested by the nutrition establishment is “avoid processed food,” which has the big advantage (for their future credibility) that no one is likely to adopt it. Cooking has become an unacceptable hassle.9

Public recognition and resistance

Until recently, public opposition to official food recommendations was mainly religious or “ethical.” The monist counterculture (“New Age”), a quasi-religious movement, has produced a series of opposition diets since the 1970s. Although some of these invoked pseudoscience, and made vague health claims, they were all mainly moralistic. They were anti-scientific and anti-capitalist (as monism typically is). The rise of politically-correct food labelling (“fair trade”) may have been partly in response to increasing public realization of the dubiosity of nutritional claims, but it was mainly explicitly ethical.

An uneasy sense that nutrition recommendations had changed too many times, too quickly, seems to have gradually dawned on the public starting about a decade ago. Up until then, almost everyone simply accepted official pronouncements without question. Early 2000s studies supporting the high-fat Atkins diet seem to have shifted the mood. Intelligent people recognized that nutritional advice is uncertain, and liable to change again soon. So then you have to ask: why bother paying attention to the current guidelines?

There’s been another, dramatic change over the past year (starting late in 2014, I think). Science-savvy members of the commentariat—journalists and bloggers—are finally starting to recognize that there is no there, there: nutrition has no cards to play.10

Meaningful food

It’s extraordinary how certain and passionate everyone is about their nutritional beliefs—mainstream or alternative—despite the lack of any basis for them. Religion and politics are the only other domains that commonly inspire such delusional commitment.

Every human culture gives elaborate meanings to food—to hunting, gathering, growing, harvesting, processing, cooking, sharing, and eating it. Every culture has elaborate ideologies of what you should and should not do with food—most of which seem insane to anyone from a different culture. (These constitute the standard example of the eternalist ploy of purity.)

Food is hugely evolutionarily important, so it is not surprising that humans give it such meanings. It’s rather more surprising that something so evolutionarily important should have such divergent meanings attached. Aren’t most of them maladaptive?

A speculation: Perhaps the urge to give foods meanings is a relic of our former hunter-gatherer lifestyle, when keeping track of the edibility, habits, and best use of thousands of species was important. Mythological narratives (“we are forbidden to eat that berry by Flying-Buffalo-Woman, who was tricked with one by Centipede-God”) were valuable as mnemonics encoding cultural knowledge. Often that could be a matter of life and death.

Nowadays, even though the evolutionary purpose is lost, we can’t help making up myths about food, and still feel compelled into believing and enforcing them.

I will discuss the meanings given food again in two later chapters:

• The ethics chapter considers the moralization of food. There are legitimate ethical questions, but many claims I find highly dubious: not because they are ethically wrong, but because the issues are not ethical ones at all. I use these as examples of a broader phenomenon: the metastasis of morality into domains where it has no business.
• In the history of meaningness chapter, I will describe how the meaning of food has changed over the past few decades, as we’ve moved through the systematic, counter-cultural, subcultural, atomized, and fluid modes of relating to meaningness.

• 1. There are healthy non-Western populations with diets very different from each other’s. Some of those may be somewhat better than others, but there’s no strong reason to believe so. A century of scientific research has failed to discover any nutritional facts. More and better research might; but we can’t be certain of that a priori.
• 2. For “literally know nothing,” see for example the recent Ioannidis editorial in the BMJ. There are two exceptions. First, they know you should shouldn’t eat poisons. Arsenic and polychlorinated biphenyls are bad for you. Second, there are some chemicals (vitamins, for instance) that you have to get some of, or else you get a deficiency disease. Neither of these facts are relevant to anyone with a vaguely normal diet.
• 3. The supposed connection with cardiovascular disease goes back to the work of Ancel Keys in the 1950s. However, avoiding saturated fat and cholesterol for cardiovascular reasons only became the mainstream message around 1980. The supposed cancer connection was new in the mid–80s, and gave further credence and urgency to the anti-fat campaign.
• 4. This led also to the recommendation that you should eat more antioxidants. That message is still common, although most follow-on studies of specific antioxidants found that they are bad for you.
• 5. Since nothing is actually known about nutrition, we can’t be sure the low-fat diet caused the obesity epidemic. Correlation is not causation; but it’s quite suggestive in this case.
• 6. The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet is supposed to be a good history. I haven’t read it.
• 7. I described this in “Perfection Salad.”
• 8. Ioannidis notes that “Almost every single nutrient imaginable has peer reviewed publications associating it with almost any outcome.”
• 9. Disclosure: I do avoid processed food, and most of what I eat I cook from scratch. This is not advice.
• 10. The paleo movement has played a major role in this. Paleo is interesting as a subculture that combines romantic rebellion with scientistic rationalism. That potent combination that has made it the most effective anti-authoritarian diet ideology so far. With difficulty, I’ve resisted writing more about that here; this page is already too long.

Nihilism holds that there is no meaning or value anywhere. Questions about purpose, ethics, and sacredness are unanswerable because they are meaningless. You might as well ask about the sleep habits of colorless green ideas as about the meaning of life.

Nihilism is a mirror image of eternalism—the stance that everything is meaningful. (For an introduction, see “Preview: eternalism and nihilism.”) However, the two stances are not simply opposites; they share fundamental metaphysical assumptions.

Eternalism and nihilism both fail to recognize that nebulosity and pattern are inseparable. Therefore they suppose that “real” meaning would be absolutely patterned: perfectly definite and certain, unchanging and objective. This is their shared metaphysical error.

Eternalism insists that meaning really is like that. That is its second metaphysical error. Nihilism observes, accurately, that no such meaning is possible. This corrects the second error. However, because nihilism shares the first error, it concludes that meaning is impossible, period. This is also wrong; nebulous meanings are “real,” for any reasonable definition of “real.”

Nihilism is attractive to those who have explicitly recognized, understood, and rejected eternalism’s second error: belief in ultimate meaning. That is not easy. Nihilism is, therefore, the more intelligent stance. Or, at least, it’s a stance that tends to be adopted more often by more intelligent people. (It’s even more dysfunctional than eternalism, so we could also call it less intelligent.)

While most people are committed, however waveringly, to eternalism, only a few commit to nihilism. In denying all meaning, nihilism is wildly implausible. Only a few sociopaths, intellectuals, and depressives try to maintain it.

We’ll see, though, that almost everyone adopts the nihilistic stance at times, without noticing. When the complete stance is unknown, nihilism seems like the only possible defense against the harmful lies of eternalism. (Just as eternalism seems like the only possible salvation from the harmful lies of nihilism.)

Even if you are relatively immune to nihilism, it’s important to understand as a prototype. Many other confused stances are modified or limited forms of nihilism. They reject particular types of meanings, rather than rejecting all meaningfulness. That makes their distortions, harms, and emotional dynamics similar to nihilism’s.

Overview

The first page in this section discusses several obstacles you must overcome to even get to nihilism. The main one is the obviousness of meaning. Even before that, you have to let go of the hope that eternalism can somehow be made to work. There are also strong social and cultural taboos against nihilism. Finally, nihilism has nasty psychological side-effects that make you miserable.

The second page explains briefly what it would mean to accomplish nihilism: a state of total apathy. This would, theoretically, end suffering (which is one reason nihilism is attractive). It’s probably impossible, although some religious systems seem to advocate it.

Most of my discussion of nihilism concerns its emotional dynamics. I begin with an analogy: eternalism is like one of those email scams that promises you millions of dollars in exchange for help getting money out of Nigeria. If you fall for that, catastrophic financial loss ensues.

Nihilism entails a similar catastrophic loss: the loss of meaning. The next page gives an overview of our psychological reactions to that loss: rage, intellectual argument, depression, and anxiety. Each gets its own, more detailed page.

In addition, I address the content of nihilistic intellectualization. This is a collection of reasons for rejecting obvious meanings as “not really meaningful.” They are supposedly the wrong kind of meaning; not ultimate, not objective, not eternal, not inherent, or not higher. So what? These arguments are bogus and nonsensical. They usually conceal a hidden motivation: the issue is not qualitative (the “wrong kind” of meaning) but quantitative (available meanings seem inadequately compelling). This is a psychological and practical problem, not a philosophical one, so psychological and practical methods may help.

The antidotes to nihilism are partly intellectual: realizing why it’s incorrect and harmful. Mainly, though, antidotes restore meaningfulness, by making it more powerful, more obvious, more compelling, more enjoyable.

I hope this chapter on nihilism will be useful both to people who think they aren’t nihilists, and to people who think they are.

Nihilism is a thing you and I, personally, do sometimes. Everyone does, sometimes.

If nihilism were just a conceptual philosophy—something to think and talk about—you could safely ignore it. But doing nihilism is bad for us: bad enough that it’s worth the effort to stop. This chapter explains how.

For non-nihilists: what you can learn from nihilism

I will suggest to non-nihilists that understanding nihilism in detail is important. You are right to reject it: nihilism is harmful and mistaken. However, it is not an abstruse philosophical irrelevance, because everyone falls into nihilism at least occasionally. I’ll suggest that you may be more nihilistic than you realize, and it may be causing you more trouble than you think.

What is at stake here is our understanding and control over our own lives. Nihilism matters because meaning matters, and the best-known alternative ways of relating to meaning are also wrong.

Fear of nihilism is a main reason people commit to other stances, such as eternalism and existentialism, that are also harmful and mistaken. A clearer understanding of what’s wrong with nihilism can help you avoid those too.

For nihilists: this is not the usual denunciation

The usual arguments against nihilism are nonsense. I will confirm that you are right to reject them. I will agree with much of what you believe about meaning, and agree that it is important. Meanings are, for example, not cosmic, eternal, or personal, and this matters.

Realizing that eternalism and existentialism are wrong is the main reason people try to be nihilists, which makes it a more intelligent stance.

However, nihilism itself—“nothing is meaningful”—is harmful and mistaken. This chapter explains why, with detailed analyses that are unlike those you have seen before.

I hope to persuade you that you cannot actually be a nihilist, because you are too intelligent to fully convince yourself that nothing is meaningful. However, committing to nihilism, and attempting to live by it, may be causing you more trouble than you realize.

For both nihilists and non-nihilists: a better alternative

Fortunately, there is another possibility, not well-known, the complete stance. It is not harmful or mistaken.

However, you can only get there once you understand exactly why nihilism and eternalism are both mistakes. That is why you may find it worth your while to read this chapter—whatever you currently think about nihilism.

Where are meanings? A false choice

Three facts seem true:

1. Meanings are not objective.
2. Meanings are not subjective.
3. Meanings exist.

Almost everything said about nihilism assumes these three together form a contradiction. In that case, one of them must be false:

1. Denying the first fact is eternalism: the stance that meanings are objectively fixed.
2. Denying the second fact is existentialism: the stance that meanings are subjective, and so can be chosen at will.
3. Denying the third fact is nihilism: the stance that nothing means anything.

Each of these confused stances is mistaken and harmful. The proper and useful conclusion from the three facts is that meaning is neither objective nor subjective.

Kumquats are neither just nor unjust—and yet, amazingly, they exist! Kumquats are neither triangular nor square—yet, astonishingly, they exist! How on earth can this be!

Kumquats are not a sort of thing that can be just or unjust. Meanings are not a sort of thing that can be objective or subjective.

Triangular and square are not the only shapes. There is also oval. Objective and subjective are not the only ways of being. There is also interactive.

Physical analogies for meaningness

Concepts about meaningness all rest on physical analogies.1 Physical analogies are the basis both of physical explanations of meaning, and of theories that deny meanings are physical.

Unfortunately, these analogies are misleading. That is not because meaningness is non-physical—the explanations I give later in the book are physical. They are misleading because the wrong sorts of physical phenomena get used as analogs.

Nihilism rests mainly on a bad analogy: that meanings have definite locations, like little physical objects. A marble is either in the jar, or out of the jar. Meanings, most people assume, are either inside your head, or outside your head.

But meanings are not specifically located. Neither are some better-understood physical phenomena: reflections, rainbows, and mirages, for instance. At the end of this page, I’ll suggest these are better (though still imperfect) analogies for meaning.

Putting meanings in things

A natural view is that meanings are objective: inherent in things. Consider purpose, for instance, one of the main dimensions of meaningness. The purpose of a pot is cooking. The purpose of wheat is nutrition. The purpose of your stomach is digestion.

This is the way everyone thinks about purpose most of the time, because it’s simple and mostly works. If we left it at that, it would rarely cause problems (despite being wrong). Unfortunately, there are philosophers, who want to make up stories about how things work. So how do inherent meanings work?

Well, humans make things for purposes. So apparently the maker of a pot gives it its purpose. But what about natural things like wheat? Here, we need God, who created the natural things, and gave them purposes. In the Medieval worldview, all things had fixed, intrinsic purposes, according to their kind. Things not obviously useful were created by God to provide moral lessons. The pelican, for example, stabs its own breast to draw blood to feed its children:2 a paradigm of compassionate self-sacrifice.

Likewise, every kind of object has an intrinsic degree of value, according to the Great Chain of Being decreed by God.

On this view, God puts meanings in objects, like marbles in a jar. Or, a better analogy would be the jelly in a jelly donut: you can’t see the meaning just by looking.

Actually, if you cut things open, you can’t find the meaning inside. It doesn’t ooze out. So maybe meaningfulness is more like a fluid that suffuses objects. If you soak a sponge cake in rum, that invisible essence pervades the dessert, and you can’t specifically locate it—although you can taste it.

How does this work? God works in mysterious ways, but how exactly does a human potter put the meaning in the pot? What is this meaning made of, and where do you get it from? If a potter puts a pot-meaning into a hammer, what then? If you always use a pot to hold marbles, instead of for cooking, have you changed its inherent purpose?

As the scientific worldview developed, it became clear that physical objects are “just atoms and the void.” There’s no place inside objects for meanings to hide.

Nothing is inherently meaningful. Nihilism is quite right about that.

This does not mean everything is inherently meaningless! Meanings are not a sort of thing that can be inherent, because they have no specific location. As we shall see.

Putting meanings in minds

A potter cannot put a purpose in a pot; but the potter knows the purpose of the pot. Perhaps the purpose is inside the potter, not the pot. The potter can explain the purpose of pots to their users, and then it lives inside them too.

Probably in their heads. Like marbles. Although, if you cut open people’s heads, you can’t find any.

So, we invented “minds,” which are metaphysical jars for putting meanings in. Despite being immaterial, the mind is also somehow in the head. Maybe it’s one of those subtle fluids, which pervades the brain, like rum.3

The problem with putting meanings in people’s heads is that people disagree. If meanings were in objects, we could resolve conflicts by determining the objective truth. But disagreement is fatal for all subjective accounts of meaning. This is most obvious in ethics. If I consider eating people OK and you consider it morally wrong, and if what it means to be right or wrong is nothing other than our opinions, then we cannot even begin a discussion. We cannot state any reasons, and there is no way to change someone’s mind. (How would this work in educating children? “Stop biting your sister!” “Subjectively, it is right for me to do so.”)

So, we could put the marbles in God’s head. His job was to keep track of all the meanings for us; and it was jolly decent of him to work so hard at it. Sadly, after a protracted illness, he died in the 1880s. A series of attempts to construct other eternal ordering principles, as replacement meaning-keeping golems, all failed.

Since God joined the choir invisible, most people have held individualistic, subjective theories of meaning.4 Two popular ones are existentialism and the representational theory of mind.

Existentialism says you have to craft your own marbles by hand. It’s frightfully important that yours be different from everyone else’s. You must be creative and artistic and intuitive when making your very own meanings. Also, romantically rebellious and resolute and heroic and stuff. Unfortunately, this project proves impossible: at most, a tiny fraction of personal meanings can be distinctive.

The representational theory of mind says that meanings are like little slips of paper, with the meanings written on them, that live in your head. A cookie fortune is meaningful if you can read it and what it says creates a new relationship between you and the world. Who reads the meanings in your head? How do they create relationships? It takes a billion tiny spooks to do that.

If you are a nihilist, you have understood—correctly—that subjective theories of meaning cannot work. Subjective meaning is none at all.

If you believe in a subjective theory, you may balk at that claim. I’ll give detailed arguments later in the book. Few of those are new or likely to surprise you, though. Subjectivism appears plausible only when it seems the least bad of the three bad alternatives.

So, you may be better persuaded by explanations of how meaning can be neither objective nor subjective, but interactive. Like… a rainbow.

Like a rainbow

A rainbow is a three-way interaction among the sun, water droplets, and an observer.

A rainbow is a physical phenomenon, but not a physical object. It has no specific location. Two observers standing a hundred feet apart will see “the rainbow” in different places. If you drive toward a rainbow, it appears to recede just as fast, so you can never get to it.

Rainbows are pretty fully understood, and guaranteed 100% metaphysics-free.

Although an observer is necessarily involved, a rainbow is not subjective. It is not “mental,” not an illusion, and does not depend on any magical properties of brains. The observer can just as well be a camera.

The rainbow is not in your head, or in the camera. But it is also not an object-out-there. It is not in the mist, and not in the sun, although both are required for a rainbow to occur.

A rainbow is not “objective” in the sense of “inherent in an object.” It is “objective” in a different sense: the presence of a rainbow is publicly verifiable. Rational, unbiased observers will generally agree about whether or not there is a rainbow.5

To make the analogy explicit, meanings:

• are interactions among people and circumstances
• are physical phenomena, but not physical objects
• have no definite locations (whether inside or outside heads)
• are observer-relative, to varying extents
• are usually well-understood, and 100% metaphysics-free
• are mostly not subjective, mental, illusory, or dependent on magical properties of brains
• are not inherent in objects
• mostly are publicly verifiable, so reasonable observers mostly agree about them

This analogy makes plausible the claim that meanings can be non-objective, non-subjective, and existent. That is good enough for this chapter, because nihilism mostly seems plausible only if you accept the forced choice among objectivity, subjectivity, and non-existence.

In nearly every other way, meanings are unlike rainbows, so it’s important not to take the analogy literally. One important difference is that a rainbow’s observer (whether animate or artificial) is mainly passive.6 Observation does not affect the sun or mist. Meanings are activities, in which causality typically runs in all directions.

Rainbows once seemed magical, mysterious, and metaphysical. Now we have a pretty complete understanding of them. Meanings may now seem magical, mysterious, or metaphysical. They’re more complicated than rainbows—but I think we can gain a pretty complete understanding of them too.

I will replace the rainbow analogy with much more detailed and accurate explanations later. These too draw on physical analogs, such as the chaotic pendulum; but mainly on observing meanings directly. As background, the explanations require considerable conceptual machinery that will be unfamiliar to most readers, but fortunately that is not necessary for this chapter.

• 1. Later in the book, I suggest that metaphysical intuitions about matters other than meaning are also misplaced physical intuitions. This may explain why people defend metaphysical intuitions so strongly, despite their often differing dramatically from person to person, and despite their having no empirical basis.
• 2. Or so it was believed. Presumably no one has ever observed a pelican doing this, but that doesn’t seem to have been a problem.
• 3. The mental fluid idea goes back at least as far as Galen, in the second century AD, who called it “psychic pneuma.” Descartes promoted a similar model of “animal spirits”: “a fine wind, or lively and pure flame.” That was highly influential, although conceptually incoherent and anatomically ignorant even for his day. Maybe no one believes this theory now, but it’s still a common way of thinking. For instance, explanations of the extended mind theory are commonly misunderstood as promoting some sort of ectoplasm that oozes out of your skull and goes on astral adventures.
• 4. Many religious people do commit to the marbles-in-the-mind-of-God theory, of course. I gather that living in a predominantly secular culture makes this difficult to maintain consistently, however. Slipping into a relativist, subjective view is a constant danger.
• 5. Later, I’ll explain how nihilism and eternalism exploit such ambiguities in “objective” and “subjective” to render plausible reasoning that would otherwise seem plainly false.
• 6. Although, perception is actually an active process. This turns out to be important in understanding how meaningness does work, and I’ll come back to it in the discussion of objects and boundaries later.

Let’s distinguish six attitudes to “nothing means anything”:

1. Full-strength nihilism: Nothing is meaningful at all. Period.
2. Nihilism Lite™: OK, maybe some things are “meaningful” in some trivial sense, but not really meaningful. Those meanings don’t count! Therefore, everything is awful.
3. Miserabilism: Everything is awful, so nothing means anything.
4. Existentialism: Nothing is objectively meaningful, but subjective meanings are real.
5. Materialism: There are no higher meanings, but mundane goals like food, safety, sex, power, money, and fame seem meaningful to us, due to evolution.
6. The complete stance: Meaning is neither subjective nor objective; meanings are real but nebulous; this is fine!

All these might be called “nihilism,” but they are entirely different in their implications, and in their rational and emotional workings. I will devote a page, or several, to discussing each, separately. Here, I’ll summarize my treatment of each, with an eye particularly to seeing the distinctions between them.

Hardcore, full strength, 190-proof nihilism

Let’s say you stopped by the store on the way home from work to get cat food, because your spouse texted you to say that you’d run out. Getting cat food was your purpose for going to the supermarket. Purpose is one of the main dimensions of meaningness. Going to the supermarket was meaningful: if you forgot, your cat would go hungry and would suffer and complain. This meaning is not merely subjective, at least not in the sense that it’s just in your head. Your cat finds food meaningful, too. If you failed to feed your cat for long enough, it might seriously reevaluate your relationship, and there would be consequences. Your spouse might have something to say, too.

Hardcore nihilism insists that, no, actually, you had no purpose in going to the store. The supposed purpose was an illusion. There are no purposes at all.

This is basically just silly, and motivated only by stubbornness. I don’t believe anyone actually holds hardcore nihilism, although some people do try to argue for it publicly. It is a fallback position when you get backed into a corner by someone pointing out that, obviously, many things are meaningful; yet you want to continue to claim to be a nihilist. It’s logically consistent in a way that (as we’ll see) lite nihilism is not; but it requires defiance of all sense and evidence.

Attempts to justify it involve elaborate intellectual obfuscation: sophistical, scientistical, pseudo-rational fallacies. I’ll cover these in later, in “190-proof nihilism: intoxicating intellectual idiocy.”

Nihilism Lite™

Lite nihilism grants the obvious, that some things are meaningful “in some trivial sense,” but insists that they are not “really” meaningful. The kinds of meaning that would actually matter don’t exist, so you might as well just kill yourself.

So you may agree that going to the supermarket was slightly meaningful, in some uninteresting sense; but you hasten to add that this does not imply that Life has an Ultimate Cosmic Meaning, or anything like that! Which is entirely correct. However, it is a different claim from “nothing means anything.”

Lite nihilism starts from the intelligent recognition that the kinds of meaning claimed by eternalism indeed do not exist. For example, meanings are not inherent, or eternal, or perfectly definite or certain. That means that the seductive promises of eternalism are harmful lies. It cannot deliver the benefits of total understanding and control that it advertises.

Lite nihilism’s error is the implication that the kinds of meaning that do exist are all trivial and inadequate. This conclusion is rarely (if ever) spelled out in detail. The typical pattern is to jump from “meanings don’t last forever” to “so everything is worthless,” without explanation. There is a powerful emotional logic to this, but is it correct? What exactly is wrong with non-eternal meanings?

What kinds of meaning do exist, once eternalistic delusions are stripped away? For what purposes, and in what ways, are they inadequate—if they are? These questions deserve careful investigation.

The distinction between 190-proof nihilism and the lite version is rarely made explicit, so we tend to switch between them as needed to make nihilism seem plausible. We can slide from “nothing is inherently meaningful” to “nothing is meaningful” without noticing we’re doing that. In fact, we do that deliberately, to pull the wool over our own eyes.

The promise of nihilism is “you don’t have to care.” This works only if there is no meaning at all. You obviously do care about feeding the cat, so only if that is negated could nihilism deliver any benefit. If you admitted mundane matters like cat food are meaningful, you’d effectively transition from nihilism to materialism. Materialism’s promises and emotional dynamics are quite different. The circumstances in which materialism seems attractive are not the ones in which nihilism is attractive, so you may want to avoid the switch.

So the idea here is to trick yourself into thinking that arguments for lite nihilism (or even materialism) are really arguments for full-strength nihilism.1

In “Why is Lite Nihilism mistaken,” I go through various properties that eternalism claims meaning has, and which lite nihilism rejects. (For example, meanings are not eternal, ultimate, or God-given.) For each, I explain why we should not be upset about meaning not working that way.

Miserabilism

By “miserabilism” I mean the view that everything is awful.2 Thinking that everything is awful is depressing, and depression frequently leads to nihilism. Nihilism also leads to depression, and depression leads to thinking that everything is awful, so all three of these support each other. In experience, “everything is awful” and “everything is meaningless” feel similar, and they usually come at the same time.

However, “everything is awful” is actually an entirely different statement from “everything is meaningless.” In fact they are incompatible, because “awful” is a value judgment—a meaning—and nihilism denies all values. “Everything is awful” can inspire us to work to make things better; it is a potentially powerful source of purpose. By declaring that everything is awful, which is a fixed meaning, miserabilism is technically a species of eternalism! Nevertheless, I’ll discuss miserabilism further in the section on nihilistic depression.

Materialism

The materialistic stance, which rejects “higher” meanings but affirms mundane purposes, is often described as “nihilistic.” Materialism does not meet the book’s definition of “nihilism”—denial of all meanings—but it does have some of the same emotional dynamics. Seeing through eternalist claims about higher meanings hits you with the same feelings of loss as nihilism’s denial of all meanings.

Still, materialism is different enough from nihilism that I devote a separate chapter to it.

Existentialism

I use “existentialism” to mean the idea that meanings must be subjective because they are not objective.3 Then you could either say that subjective meanings are just fine, so there’s no problem; or you could say that subjective meanings are no damn good, so everything is awful.

The “no damn good” conclusion makes existentialism into a branch of Nihilism Lite™. This is what historically happened to existentialism as a cultural movement in the mid-20th century. As existentialists worked out the implications of a subjective theory of meaning, it looked increasingly inadequate and unworkable and led to individual and group rage, intellectual pretentiousness, depression, and angst—the four emotional characteristics of nihilism. As a movement, existentialism collapsed half a century ago.

Many intelligent non-philosophers accept the premise that meaning must be subjective, but don’t see why this should be a problem, and advocate an optimistic existentialism. This stance is rare among academic philosophers.

I think a subjective theory of meaning cannot, in fact, be made to work. Existentialism collapsed for good reasons. The subjective theory of meaning is factually wrong, and trying seriously to make it work leads to nihilism inevitably.

Meaningness develops an understanding of meaning as neither objective nor subjective. Detailed explanation has to be postponed to much later in the book, but there’s a preliminary analysis of existentialism right after I finish with nihilism.

The complete stance (“Joyful nihilism”)

Above, I asked:

What kinds of meaning do exist, once eternalistic delusions are stripped away? For what purposes, and in what ways, are they inadequate—if they are?

This book, Meaningness, could be summarized as an investigation into these questions. It suggests that meaningness is nebulous, which accounts for what’s right in nihilism’s rejection of eternalist meaning. It suggests also that meaningness is patterned: real, concrete, and functional. These patterns are adequate; the nebulosity of meaningness does not imply there is anything wrong with the universe. We can’t get the kinds of meaning some may want, but we can get the kinds we need. Certainty is not possible, but knowledge is; total control is not possible, but strong influence is; complete understanding is not possible, but incrementally better ones are.

Since the complete stance agrees with lite nihilism’s analysis and rejection of eternalism, it might be considered a species of nihilism by some. In fact, I sometimes think of it as “joyful nihilism”—although it strongly disagrees with nihilism’s central claim that “nothing means anything.”

Going through that analysis in detail takes one a fair way toward explaining the complete stance. Upcoming pages will explain why lite nihilism is right to reject eternalism’s characterization of meanings as objective, eternal, inherent, ultimate, and so forth; but wrong to insist that meanings that lack these properties are no good. Accepting both parts of that is tantamount to adopting the complete stance.

• 1. This is an instance of the “motte and bailey” pattern of fallacious rhetoric. Usually rhetoric is designed to convince other people, but nihilism is mostly something you try to convince yourself of.
• 2. I have given “miserabilism” this meaning by fiat for the purpose of this book. The word is not widely used and doesn’t seem to have a clear definition. “Pessimism” is often used for everything-is-awful-ism in philosophy, but the everyday meaning of “pessimism” is restricted to the future. Miserabilism is about the present (or near future, as opposed to the long term).
• 3. “Existentialism” is not a precisely-defined term. The way I’m using it here may not be “standard,” but it’s roughly in-line with some traditional uses.

Confidence tricks have a common structure. The victim is offered something that is too good to be true: great value in exchange for something much smaller.

Critically, the victim’s side of the deal is to do something that is itself unethical. That explains why the offer is so good: not everyone, reasons the victim, would do this deal, so the guy offering it to me has to make it sweet. Once the victim realizes he has been scammed, the illegality of his own action prevents him from going to the authorities.

The most common current confidence trick is the Nigerian “419” spam scam. You get an email that reads like this:

Kitschy eternalism metaphorically sends you spam that reads like this:

This scam is too good to be true—but also too good not to go for. We are all sometimes willing to do violence to our own intelligence in hope of salvation.

And so we all get conned, over and over, by eternalism.

Nihilism begins with the intelligent recognition that you have been conned by eternalism. Nihilism is the defiant determination not to get fooled again. Having been swindled over and over by false promises of meaning, the nihilist stance refuses to acknowledge even the most obvious manifestations of meaningfulness—lest they, too, turn out to be illusory.

Betrayal and loss

Eternalism makes seductive promises: that you are always loved, that the universe is in good order, that right and wrong can be known for certain, that your suffering has meaning, that you have a special role in creation, that there will be cosmic justice after death.

When you have been disappointed often enough, you start to realize these sweet lies are poison. Such grand promises cannot be kept. Discovering that you have been betrayed by eternalism, and have lost out on the promises it made, is a horrendous emotional blow.

On the last page, I compared eternalism with the Nigerian “419” fraud. Many retired people have lost their entire life savings to this spam-based scam. They face the same set of emotional reactions we have to any other catastrophic loss, such as a divorce following infidelity: denial, anger, arguing, depression, anxiety, and acceptance.1

On this page, I’ll explain briefly the dynamics of these reactions to loss of faith in eternalism. Then I’ll devote a full page to each strategy separately.

Denial: wavering eternalism

One’s first reaction to recognizing the nebulosity of meaningness is to deny it. On some level, you realize that not everything has a definite meaning; that eternalism is false. But since that seems too awful to contemplate, you refuse to admit it. You redouble your insistence that everything is peachy keen—and prepare to do violence to anyone and anything that contradicts you.

This is wavering eternalism. You try to maintain the eternalist stance using ploys such as kitsch, arming, and mystification. These are not nihilistic strategies; but they can easily flip into nihilism, when nebulosity becomes so obvious that pretending becomes impossible.

Anger

Nihilism is a simple inversion of eternalism. It denies that there anything is meaningful at all. At times when meaning is particularly evanescent, when you are particularly bitterly disappointed in it, you may commit to nihilism. “I’ll never get fooled again!”

But this commitment is difficult—probably impossible. Meaningfulness is, at other times, obvious. As a result, in practice all nihilism is wavering nihilism.

Whereas wavering eternalism consists of eternalism plus secret doubt, wavering nihilism consists of nihilism plus secret passion. Passion is the recognition of meaningfulness. To maintain wavering nihilism, you must blind yourselves to meaningfulness, which is even more difficult than blinding yourselves to the nebulosity of meaning.

Rage is one way wavering nihilism reacts to evidence of meaningfulness. This is a defiant negativity: “I don’t care! No matter what you say, I will not admit life is meaningful!” Nihilistic rage wants to destroy whatever has meaning, and whoever points to meaning. (This is the mirror-image strategy to armed eternalism.)

I mentioned that the people most prone to nihilism are sociopaths, intellectuals, and depressives. These are the people best able to deploy the corresponding approaches of rage, argument, and depression. Almost everyone adopts all these strategies at times, however.

Arguing with reality

Eternalism uses willful stupidity to not-see nebulosity. Realizing that you have been duped, and seeing through eternalism’s lies, is intelligent. Mostly, only unusually smart people explicitly commit to nihilism.2

Smart people are used to using clever arguments to get what they want. So it is natural to apply intellectual brilliance to the difficult task of maintaining wavering nihilism, to fight its greatest obstacle: the obviousness of meaningfulness. Nihilistic intellectualization is the counterpart to eternalist kitsch: calm insistence on plainly false claims.

Somehow meaningfulness must be explained away by conceptual sleight-of-hand. A theory that proves “nothing is really meaningful”—in which “really” is the gate to a hell writhing with logical demons—can distract you from the obvious.

This theory has to get complicated quickly in order to be sufficiently confusing, or seem so insightful as to dazzle you into submission. Typically, nihilistic intellectualization involves extreme abstraction, voluminous intricacy, sesquipedalian diction, non-standard logic, and often reflexivity (meta-level analysis). These insulate the argument from checking against everyday experience.3

Because nihilistic intellectualization is often colored by its sister-strategies of anger or depression, it is often aggressive, hostile, cynical, or pessimistic; whereas eternalistic justifications are typically cloying, simpering, naïve, and Pollyanna-ish.

Depression

Realizing that eternalism will always fail often results in anguish, pessimism, depression, stoicism, alienation, apathy, exhaustion, and paralysis.

The loss of guaranteed meaningfulness is a real one, and it is natural to feel sad about it. Depression goes beyond spontaneous sadness, however. It is active and deliberate—although it feels passive and externally imposed.

Nihilistic depression suppresses the feelings (positive and negative) that go with recognition of meaning. Depression can be thought of as rage turned inward. It tries to kill your passionate response to reality.

Depression copes with loss by lowering the stakes. It wants to disengage from problems of meaning by refusing to admit that they are important. If nothing is really meaningful, then the loss of meaning does not matter. Of course, you do care about life. But that is unacceptable when you have committed to nihilism. That caring is the main obstacle to accomplishing nihilism, and depression tries to annihilate it.

Acceptance

Acceptance of both meaninglessness and meaningfulness is the way out of nihilism, and into the complete stance.

One has to fully allow the emotional loss that comes with the collapse of eternalism. The pain of loss is real and cannot be destroyed, talked away, or minimized (as the nihilistic coping strategies attempt to do). You have to admit that you do care, that the world is meaningful, so the stakes are high. But you also have to learn to turn away from eternalism’s alluring promise to remove the pain by restoring fixed meanings.

Conceptual understanding of nebulosity is probably required. Until you understand how meaningfulness and meaninglessness coexist, confused stances alternate, jostling for position as meaning and lack of meaning become more and less obvious. The complete stance remains invisible until you learn the sideways move to nebulosity. Nebulosity allows the coexistence of pain and joy, and reveals the benefits of meaninglessness.

Appropriation

Nihilism’s analysis of the defects of eternalism is largely right. That analysis can be appropriated in the complete stance.

Nihilistic rage can be transformed into clear-minded rejection of fixation; nihilistic intellectualization into non-conceptual appreciation of nebulosity; nihilistic depression into enjoyment of meaninglessness with equanimity.

• 1. This list is close to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (On Death and Dying) observation of the stages of emotional reactions to one’s own impending death. Not everyone necessarily has all the same reactions; but it’s a useful framework for the discussion here. She did not consider anxiety a stage, but it is a pervasive feature of grieving, and other experts have suggested that it should be included in the list.
• 2. This is a generalization, of course. It is possible to make brilliant conceptual arguments in favor of eternalism (usually in defense of a system, such as an eternalist religion or political ideology). There are probably also stupid people who commit to nihilism (although I have not come across one).
• 3. Nihilistic intellectualization is characteristic of postmodernist thought. I will have much more to say about postmodernism later in the book.

If you arrive unfamiliar with the term “complete stance”: postpone this page! It will seem boring and technical. Instead, read “Preview: eternalism and nihilism” for an introduction to the topic.

The complete stance recognizes that meaningness is both nebulous and patterned. Put another way, it neither fixates nor denies meanings. Or, equivalently: it enables the realistic and creative possibilities that emerge when you let go of eternalism and nihilism simultaneously.

The complete stance looks unattractive from a distance because—unlike eternalism and nihilism—it does not claim to be The Ultimate Answer. Unlike eternalism and nihilism, it makes no comforting promises of certainty, understanding, control, or non-responsibility.

From a distance, it also looks dauntingly complicated, because it works with both pattern and nebulosity, plus their intricate interrelationships.

You are already in the complete stance

From its own point of view, the complete stance is simpler than either eternalism or nihilism. It sees only one thing (meaningness) not two (meaning and meaninglessness). It does not attempt to divide pattern from nebulosity—an artificial and impossible separation that causes endless complications.

It’s always obvious that meaningness is both nebulous and patterned. This means that the complete stance is also obviously right.

Because it is obviously right, we are all always already in the complete stance.

Maintaining the confused stances—eternalism, nihilism, and existentialism—is actually impossible, because they are obviously wrong. At some level, we are always aware that they require extensive make-believe.

Nevertheless, we are usually somewhat effective at pulling the wool over our own eyes, using the eternalist ploys and nihilist evasions. So we often act as if we were genuinely eternalists, nihilists, or existentialists; and this has awful consequences.

The complete stance looks boring from a distance

The road to the complete stance appears dull, at first, because it is obvious. The way is deflationary: it strips away the enticing dramas of the confused stances:

Eternalism

“You are on a Mission from God to fulfill the Ultimate Meaning of the Universe!”

Nihilism

“You have seen through the illusion of meaning and joined the intellectual elite who recognize the hard and cold reality of Ultimate Meaninglessness!”

Existentialism

“You have thrown off the fetters of mindless social conformity, and have the courage to create your own meanings out of raw nothingness!”

We manufacture these dramas because we fear that actually-existing meanings are inadequate. But—exciting, colorful, and appealing as fantasy-meanings may be—they are imposed, delusional, and noxious. We are better off without them.

Freedom from metaphysical delusions

The negative definition of the complete stance, as not fixating or denying meaning, is unappealing. However, it points to the main promise: freedom. Freedom from metaphysical delusions, and their propensity to limit action.

The shared metaphysical error underlying eternalism and nihilism is that the only meaningful kind of meaning would be non-nebulous: objective, eternal, distinct, changeless, and unambiguous. Recognizing that meanings are never that way, yet real all the same, is a more positive definition of the complete stance.

This chapter will begin to answer the question “how can meaning be nebulous and yet patterned?”—although bits of explanation will be scattered through the rest of the book. Partly that is because various seemingly-disparate and unfamiliar concepts are necessary as background, and I introduce those only gradually.

Mainly, however, “how” is not the point. This book is not academic philosophy. Meaningness aims to be a practical guide to working with meaning, not an abstract treatise attempting to explain it. Practically speaking, what is necessary is to recognize that meaningness is nebulous yet patterned, not to understand exactly how that can be.

Finding, stabilizing, and accomplishing the complete stance

We may begin by asking:

What is creative, but not eternalistic?
What is realistic, but not nihilistic?

Dropping attractive delusions is the antidote to eternalism. Allowing meanings to be as they are is the antidote to nihilism. Then you discover that meaningness is adequate after all—more than adequate—wondrous, delicious, and vivid!

If we are always already in the complete stance, are we already done? No. The aim is to stabilize the complete stance, so we fall back into confused stances less often; and to gain skill in working with fluid meaningness.

Curiosity, enjoyment, and creativity are three aspects of that skill.1 These are not separate; just three different ways of talking about the same art. I will say something about each in this chapter; and more throughout Meaningness.

Because this whole book is about finding, stabilizing, and accomplishing the complete stance; and because the stance is—from its own point of view—so simple and obvious, the chapter is quite short.

• 1. Vajrayanists will recognize these—along with “wondrous, delicious, and vivid”—as structural equivalents of “coemergent emptiness, bliss, and clarity,” respectively.

Monism is the idea that “All is One.” Dualism is the idea that the world consists of clearly separate objects. These ideas may seem abstract, and irrelevant to your life. However, they are central to many religious, political, and philosophical systems. Therefore, it’s important to understand why both are wrong, how they are harmful, why they are attractive, and a better alternative.

Monism and dualism are, at root, ideas about boundaries, objects, and connections. Are all things One, without boundaries? Or many separated objects? Is everything totally connected? Or is every object a clearly distinct individual?

I will begin by answering “no!” to all those questions. Realizing that the everyday world doesn’t work in either a monist or a dualist way undercuts the intuitions that make these ideas seem reasonable.

Then I will look at first monism, and then dualism, in detail. Finally, I’ll describe participation, the complete stance I recommend as a third alternative. The rest of this page summarizes these three stances.

Monism

The boundary that people care about most is the boundary between the self and the world. Denying and fixating that are the most significant applications of monism and dualism.

If All is One, then there is no boundary, and you are really the entire universe. Typically, monists say that the universe is equivalent to God, so you are actually also God. As you realize everything is totally connected, you develop the ability to affect anything you want.

This is the ultimate fantasy of power and invulnerability. However, convincing yourself that you are All-powerful, when you aren’t, does not make your life go well.

When the fantasy collides with reality, monists retreat into a make-believe magical world. Monism produces dreamy spaciness, refusal to make any clear distinctions, refusal to judge. This leads to drifting through life, expecting other people to clean up your messes, contributing nothing except spiritual clichés mouthed at unwanted times.

As a social ideology, monism tends toward totalitarian denial of individuality.

Dualism

The nebulosity of the self/other boundary means that we cannot even control our selves. What we call “self” constantly gets bits of “other” blended into it. That’s what perception does, what communication does, what interacting with the material world does.

The fantasy of dualism is that a clear separation between you and others frees you from their contaminating influence, and from responsibility to the world.

Dualism, by blinding you to connections, makes it easy to evade ethical responsibility for consequences. Psychologically, it produces alienation from the natural world, from other people, and from the sacred. As a social ideology, dualism tends toward denial of collective responsibility.

Participation

Participation is the stance that revels in the extraordinary variability of the world, that loves and engages with specifics and individuals; and also appreciates the porous self/other boundary, works skillfully with diverse connections, and accepts responsibility for whatever you encounter.

Stance	Monism	Dualism	Participation
Summary	All is One	I am clearly distinct from everything and everyone else	Reality is indivisible but diverse
What it denies	Differences, boundaries, specifics, individuality	Connection, dynamic interplay, unbounded responsibility
What it fixates	Unity; also over-emphasizes connection	Boundaries, separateness, limitations, definitions
The sales pitch	You are God	Clarity gives you control
Emotional appeal	I am all-powerful, all-knowing, immortal, invulnerable	I am not contaminated by other beings, and have only specific, limited responsibility for them
Pattern of thinking	Willful stupidity	Distrust	Engagement
Likely next stances	Eternalism, mission, true self, specialness	Can combine with either eternalism or nihilism
Accomplishment	Directly perceive all things as One	Perfect independence	Self and other neither distinct nor identical
How it causes suffering	Have to blind self to diversity of physical reality	Alienation due to being cut off from world and others
Obstacles to maintaining the stance	Obviousness of diversity	Obviousness of connection	Difficulty of understanding the philosophical view
Antidotes; counter-thoughts	Appreciation of diversity	Appreciation of connectedness
Intelligent aspect	I am not entirely separate from anything	The world is endlessly diverse
Positive appropriation after resolution	Provisional understanding of indivisibility	Points toward appreciation of diversity

Monism and dualism are opposites. But because each is obviously wrong, each turns into the other when cornered. A devious trick!

Monism is the stance that fixates sameness and connections, and denies differences and boundaries. Dualism is just the other way around: it denies sameness and connections, and fixates differences and boundaries.

Both these confused stances sometimes show themselves to be obviously wrong. The complete stance of participation recognizes that samenesses and differences, boundaries and connections, are all real, but also always somewhat nebulous: ambiguous and fluid. This is obviously accurate, but usually less convenient. Monism and dualism are simpler, and deliver particular emotional payoffs—some of the time.

The monism within dualism

All boundaries are somewhat vague. This is true of physical boundaries, and of abstract category boundaries. Sometimes you cannot say on which side of the boundary something falls—not for lack of knowledge, but because there is no right or wrong answer. This is intolerable for dualism.

Confronted with this nebulosity, dualism tries to harden the boundary by putting everything clearly on one side or the other. How? What defines a boundary? Everything inside the boundary is one way, and everything outside is the other way. Dualism exaggerates the commonality of everything inside, and the commonality of everything outside. It forces a choice onto items near the boundary, which must conform to one criterion or the other.

Dualism thereby imposes an impression of homogeneity. Everything inside is, ideally, exactly the same, and perfectly connected to everything else within. Everything outside is also exactly the same. So, on either side of the boundary, dualism turns into monism!

This dynamic is closely related to essentialism, which is a typical strategy for justifying the equivalence of the apparently dissimilar. “These two might look different,” essentialism says, “but they are essentially the same.” The “essence” is an invisible, magic, indwelling property that dualism claims explains the commonality, but that cannot be detected by any ordinary means.

Particularly harmful examples of monism-within-dualism are found in ideologies governing social groups. (Religions, political orientations, and ethnicities are typical examples.) The group presses its members all to be the same; to be our kind of person. Everyone outside is treated as interchangeably the wrong kind. The ideology has no room for anyone near the border. It does not accept that people on either side vary among themselves. The amount of pressure for conformity, and for rejection of outsiders, is a measure of how pathologically dualistic the group’s functioning is.

The dualism within monism

Confronted with patterns of distinction, monism attempts to force universal homogeneity. Sameness is good; difference is bad. Pointing to unity is holy; pointing to distinctions is materialistic selfishness.

Everything and everyone is included within the One. The One is All. Anything that appears not to be included must be assimilated. Anything that cannot get fitted into the One is wrong and must be destroyed.

To see that everything is totally connected is enlightenment. To misunderstand things as separate is the root of all evil.

There must be no differences in value; everything and everyone is equal. Nothing is better than anything else. You must accept this. Claims of inequalities are discrimination; prejudice; intolerance. We must not allow intolerance; that is absolutely unacceptable. Intolerant people are ignorant and inferior.

In sum: when monism encounters a difference it cannot ignore, it turns into dualism—often a particularly absolutist and pathological dualism.

Some “spiritual” ideologies are the clearest examples of monism. They can be highly intolerant of anyone recognizing distinctions they deny, or rejecting imaginary connections they fixate. They may denounce non-believers as “scientistic materialists,” for example. As everyone knows, scientistic materialism is responsible for war, capitalist exploitation, the ecological rape of the planet, chemtrails, and vaccine-induced autism. None of those awful things would be allowed if everyone realized everything was connected.

Monist religions are exceptionally evangelical, pursuing an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. Perennialism is the claim that all religions are essentially the same. Specifically, they are essentially the same as monism. We should accept and include all religions, as different paths to the same Truth. Christianity, for example. Essentially, the message of Christianity is that you should emulate Jesus. Jesus is essentially God, who is essentially The One that is All. You emulate by realizing your essential sameness. So, really, the aim of Christianity is to discover that you are God, who is The Entire Universe.

This is a dire distortion of Christianity, which is a dualistic religion. None of Christianity—sin, salvation, the afterlife—makes any sense if you are “really” God. Nevertheless, many supposed Christians have converted to monism without noticing, and are unable to see any difference between the two. Monism, extolling tolerance, begins by saying that Christianity is totally true, but it eventually explains that old fashioned Christians are doing it wrong, because the “real” Christianity is actually monism. Christianity is only true insofar as it is monism.

Monism uses the same embrace-extend-extinguish strategy against Buddhism. Centuries ago, monist proponents of Hinduism “benevolently included” Buddhism as a “totally valid branch” of the greatly diverse tree of Hinduism. Then they insisted that everything about it was not quite right and must, step by step, be replaced with Hinduism. This was part of the reason Buddhism went extinct in India. In the past few decades, “spiritual but not religious” monism has infected modern Buddhism and mostly eaten it from within. It will be interesting to see how long Islam—perhaps the most dualistic of all religions—can withstand this virulent pathogen.

Egalitarian political ideologies also can fall into the intolerant monism that is dualistic in its approach to opponents. This is the pattern of “political correctness,” which says that everyone must be included, all beliefs must be accepted, and everyone is perfectly equal. Except for people who are not politically correct. They must be cast out. Their beliefs are unacceptable and must be silenced. They are ethically inferior; that’s their essential and permanent nature, and no amount of repentance and purification can redeem them.

The boundary between sameness and difference is nebulous yet patterned

Monism and dualism are mirror-image attempts to separate sameness and difference.

This is typical of confused stances, which come in pairs of apparent opposites. Each pair shares an underlying, unrecognized mistaken metaphysical assumption. The confused opposition can be resolved by making the assumption explicit, understanding why it is wrong, and replacing it.

The metaphysical assumption shared by monism and dualism is that boundaries must be perfectly solid, objective, eternal, clear, and definite. Monism recognizes, accurately, that there are no completely hard boundaries—but then wrongly denies that there are any differences at all. Dualism recognizes, accurately, that distinctions are important—but then wrongly fixates them.

All boundaries are somewhat nebulous; yet the patterning of the world implies that boundaries are everywhere.

There is never a perfectly definite fact-of-the-matter as to whether two things are the same or distinct. Any two things are somewhat different and somewhat similar; somewhat separated and somewhat connected. Understanding and acting on this is the complete stance, participation. It is “complete” in recognizing both sameness and difference, separation and connection.

I have used the yin/yang symbol, at the top of this page, to illustrate the pathological hard distinction between monism and dualism—the two colors in the figure. Each teardrop shape contains within it a distinct circle of the other color, which I am using to symbolize the inclusion of the opposite stance within each.

I know little about the Taoist philosophy in which the yin-yang symbol originated. I gather, though, that its metaphysics may approximate “participation.” In that case, the hard edges between black and white in the figure are misleading. As a symbol of participation, it would be more accurate if they shaded into each other. And not just gray between black and white. It would be more accurate, too, if the two halves of the diagram each showed contrasting but harmonious patterns of diverse colors.

Perhaps the ancient Chinese sages would like to commission me to redesign their sacred symbol? I haz mad graphic design skillz, and my rates can be quite reasonable on major jobs.

Further reading

The Guru Papers presents an outstanding analysis of the pathologies of monism, its denial of differences, and its trick of turning into dualism when that fails. I have posted my notes on it here. The most relevant part starts with the note for page 303.

Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity explores the pervasive nebulosity of all categories, and analyzes the pathologies of dualism and its fixation of boundaries. The book develops methods for working effectively with ambiguities of sameness and difference, avoiding both monism and dualism.

Both these books are particularly concerned with pathologies of monism and dualism in political and religious groups.

In “Inclusion, exclusion, unity and diversity” I wrote about a monist aspect of “Consensus Buddhism” (the white American Buddhist mainstream). The Consensus claims to include everyone, while deliberately excluding most Buddhists. This is a case of “dualism within monism” particularly close to home for me.

Monism is the idea that “All is One”; dualism, that the world consists of clearly separate objects. To start, we need an understanding of what it means to be one thing, or a separate thing, in general. Then we can look at what it would mean for the entire universe to be one thing, or many separate things, and what might follow from that.

There is a jar of blueberry jam on my breakfast table. I could pick it up and toss it in the air and catch it. The lid is screwed on tight, so it will hold together. The jar won’t stick to the table or to my hand.

So, intuitively, an object is a bunch of bits that are connected together, and aren’t connected to other things. The boundary of the object is where the connections stop.

These definitions are often useful in practice. However, they also often don’t work.

Are a glass jam jar, its metal lid, and the jam itself one object, or three? It depends on what I’m doing with them. If I’m moving bottles around in the fridge, looking for the mustard, I’ll treat the jar with lid and contents as one object. That’s true even if I carelessly left the lid unscrewed and it could fall off. If you have a naked waffle and ask me to “pass the jam, please,” the jar and jam are the one object I’ll pass you—but I wouldn’t include the lid. If I’m polite, I might actually remove the lid before passing the jam.

And then there is the jam itself, as I stir it into my yogurt. It’s not object-like at all. It will stick to my hand, or to the table, if I spill a bit. It’s sticky blobby goo, with semi-squashed bits of blueberry. Are the blueberry bits separate objects or not? It’s impossible, if I poke at them, to say where their boundaries lie; they fade off indeterminately into the more liquid parts of the jam. Mixing it into the yogurt, the boundary between the two substances becomes gradually, increasingly obscure, indefinite, non-existent.

A cloud is a particularly dramatic example of ideas about objects not working. (That is one reason I use the word “nebulosity” so often; it means “cloud-like-ness.”) Seen from afar, you can say that this cloud and that one are definitely distinct. Yet as you get close, you find that a cloud has no boundary at all. And, there are no connections holding it together.

So, what is going on here? The world is not objectively divisible into separate objects. Boundaries are, roughly, perceptual illusions, created by our brains. Moreover, which boundaries we see depends on what we are doing—on our purposes.

However, boundaries are not just arbitrary human creations. The world is immensely diverse. Some bits of it stick together much more than other bits. Some bits connect with each other in many ways besides just stickiness. The world is, in other words, patterned as well as nebulous.

Therefore, objects, boundaries, and connections are co-created by ourselves and the world in dynamic interaction.

Monism—“All is One”—is the denial of boundaries. It recognizes, accurately, that there are no objective boundaries, but then insists that this means there are really no boundaries at all. (Or, that boundaries are merely subjective, purely creations of the mind, which is almost as wrong.)

In the same way, monism tends to over-emphasize connections. “Everything is totally connected” is a typical false monist claim. Everything is connected—by gravity—but most things are not connected in any meaningful way. Monism sees connections that don’t exist, producing a magical world view. (Misunderstood “quantum physics” is a common justification.)

Dualism is the fixation of boundaries. It insists they are perfectly well-defined and objective. It also tends to deny connections that actually do operate.

The next several sections of the book explain how boundaries, objects, and connections work in detail. Along the way, I’ll have more to say about nebulosity and pattern. Also, I’ll lay the groundwork for understanding participation, the stance that resolves the mirror-image confusions of monism and dualism. Part of that is explaining “neither subjective nor objective, but interactive”—a theme that will be important throughout the book.

If what I said on this page was convincing, you could skip ahead, to the detailed discussions of monism, dualism, and participation.

However, the idea that the world is not made up of clearly separable objects, but is also not just one big blur, may be unfamiliar. Some readers may resist these claims; so I will explain in depth.

You may also find my explanation of how things are interesting just for its own sake.

(CC) Clauds Claudio

We are awash in ideological crazy-talk about “the self”:

• Moralists say we have to overcome our selves because they are selfish
• Psychotherapists say most people’s aren’t working well, and need tune-ups using their expert understanding of how selves should work
• Spiritual teachers say we have somehow misplaced and forgotten our true selves, and must go on quests to find them
• Most implausibly, Buddhists say the self does not exist—and, worse, many pop science writers agree!

Unfortunately, we cannot ignore these discordant voices, because questions of self are inseparable from questions of meaning: purpose, ethics, authority, and personal value.

Uneasily, we apply bits of all these stories about “self” in different circumstances. We might study one theory or many in detail, trying to make sense of our selves. Mostly, though, we try not to think to much about questions of self; it is anxiety-provoking, and experience shows it usually doesn’t lead anywhere useful.

Confused stances rest on an unnoticed, mistaken metaphysical assumption: that “the self,” if any, must be a durable, separate, continuous, well-defined thing. Then these stances claim that there is such a thing (but maybe you have the wrong sort); or that there isn’t one (and you are stupid and doomed if you disagree); or that there ought to be one (so you need to create or find it); or that there ought not to be one (so you need to get rid of yours).

“Self” contrasts with “other”; between them, there must be a boundary. The last chapter explained how boundaries are always nebulous: vague, changeable, and purpose-dependent. This is especially true of the self/other boundary. Where we draw it varies according to what we are doing—and rightly so. The same applies to boundaries between different parts of the self (insofar as it is meaningful to speak of “parts of the self” at all).

We saw that there are two confused stances concerning boundaries: monism, which denies boundaries, and dualism, which fixates them. We’ve also discussed two other fundamental confused stances: eternalism insists that everything is meaningful; nihilism denies all meaning. These can combine, producing for example monist eternalism or dualist nihilism.

• Dualist eternalism regarding the self/other boundary insists that you do have a self that is durable, separate, continuous, well-defined. Different versions assert conflicting claims about “what the self really is.” Or, they say, you should have a particular kind of self, so if you don’t, you need to fix that.
• Monist eternalism says that really there is no boundary between self and other; so if it seems like there is, you need to fix that.
• Nihilism says there is no self at all; the concept is meaningless, so if you think you have a self, you need to fix that.

These combine in extra-confused ways. Some people claim that your self really doesn’t exist, and it is bad, so you need to get rid of it. Some claim that you have a hidden True Self, and it is the same thing as having no self. Some claim this True Self is The Entire Universe.

All such confusions come from the assumption that “the self” must live in something like a house, with solid walls that stay put and keep hailstorms outside and your pet aardvarks inside. Crazy ideologies begin when insightful people notice the self/other relationship not working like that, but lack a framework for understanding nebulous boundaries.

Nebulous selfness

Recognizing that the “boundary” between self and other is both patterned (non-arbitrary, partly predictable, somewhat reliable) and nebulous (ill-defined, unstable, purpose-dependent) dissolves all the confused stances. I call this complete stance “intermittently continuing.” Here, “self” is not a thing; it’s nebulous patterns of interaction. It is sometimes useful to say “selfness” or “selfing” to underline the non-object-ness.

Having abandoned the confused stances, there’s much to say about selfness in the complete stance. And this is all fascinating and often useful. But it’s important not to overvalue the details (so I will reluctantly limit my discussion). There’s more value simply in dissolving self as a problem. Once you firmly set aside the confusions, what remains doesn’t require a lot of fussing over.

For the complete stance, meaningness lies in dynamics: patterns of interaction. To understand any particular dynamic, you have to look at aspects of both “self” and “other,” and also the “boundary” between them. (I’ve put scare quotes around all these to underline their nebulosity and non-object-ness.) Typically, most of “the self” and “the world” are irrelevant to a dynamic, so they are the wrong conceptual categories.

Aadorable aardvarks (CC) Scotto Bear

Let me make a ridiculous analogy. You notice that your house is increasingly inhabited by tarantulas, which you fail to fully appreciate due to arachnophobia. You could declare them illusions and ignore them (no-self nihilism); that would work until you wake up with a pair engaged in amorous activities on your face. You could tear down all the walls (monism) because you and tarantulas and aardvarks are All One. However, you’d still have tarantulas, plus hailstorms, and the aardvarks might bolt. You could caulk all the tiny holes around the windows to keep tarantulas out (dualism)—but we’ll see that won’t help unless you nail the front door shut too. (Then you’d starve.) You might decide that your house is the wrong kind (the kind that tarantulas infest) and move into a different one—but it turns out that won’t work either. There’s nothing wrong with your house (self).

On investigation, you discover that your daughter has been bringing home a tarantula every day to feed to the aardvarks; but they don’t like tarantulas, and ignore them, so the would-be meals wander off to inhabit your dress shoes and silverware drawer.

The problem is not with the house, nor with the world outside the house. The problem is an activity that actively transports creatures across the boundary. Discussion with your daughter reveals that her biology teacher has told her that aardvarks eat bugs, and the biggest bugs she could find were tarantulas, so she thought your pets would especially enjoy them. A misconception easily corrected; problem solved.1

Meaningness is like this, I will suggest. It is neither objective nor subjective: neither outside the self, nor inside. Rather, meanings are patterns of activity that cross the nebulous self/other boundary.

Nebulosity of self makes complete control impossible

“Intermittently continuing” is unsettling because it undercuts fantasies of control. It contradicts the ideal of a unitary subject with free will, because activity is always a dynamic, improvised collaboration with nebulous-but-patterned otherness.

(What I say here about control is condensed and may not make sense yet. I’ll explain more later in this chapter; the upcoming chapters on capability and contingency discuss nebulosity of control in depth.)

Any causal analysis of activity has to trace high-frequency loops of mutual influence that cross the self/other boundary. We cannot make independent choices because the permeability of that boundary—via perception and action—means we are never independent. It is futile to try to force interactions to conform to a preconceived idea of how they should go.

We cannot even control ourselves, because phenomena switch frequently from “self” to “other” and back; because “parts of self” have nebulous boundaries themselves; and because they are often more closely coupled to “other” than to other parts of self. As a dramatic example, when two people fall in love against their better judgement, each person’s emotions communicate more with the other’s than with their own more dispassionate thoughts.

Allowing nebulosity of selfness enables accurate relationships

Intermittently continuing means learning to be comfortable with the ambiguity and unpredictable changeability of selfness. That requires attention, courage, hard work, and good humor. However, it frees you from neurotic self-obsession, and increases the effectiveness and enjoyability of your relationships.

Supple, skillful selfing makes for satisfying, successful interactions. Firm and fluid othering enables us to play with the self/other boundary—whose interpenetrating nebulosity and pattern become a source of amusement. We can co-construct our lives as art projects in the shared space of meaningness, not inside or outside, but between and surrounding and pervading us.

• 1. Did you know that the only thing aardvarks eat besides ants and termites are aardvark cucumbers, which fruit underground? For desert-living aardvarks, these cucumbers are a vital water source. Conversely, aardvark cucumbers are entirely dependent on aardvarks for reproduction. Nothing else eats them to disperse the seeds.

Stance	The authentic, true, deep self	Selflessness	Intermittently continuing
Summary	The hidden, true self is directly connected to the Cosmic Plan, bypassing social constrictions	There is, or should be, no self	Selfness comes and goes; it varies over time and has no essential nature
What it denies	Nebulosity of self	Patterns of self; the self/other boundary; natural self-interest
What it fixates	The patterns of selfness; the self/other boundary	Discontinuity; absence of self/other boundary
The sales pitch	Your true self is much more exciting than your yucky regular one	You can get rid of your yucky regular self	The patterned self is unproblematic once its nebulosity is accepted
Emotional appeal	I’m much better than I thought I was	I have nothing to lose
Pattern of thinking	Romantic idolization of fantasy self	Willful blindness to continuity and self-interest	Humorous affection for one’s foibles; absence of anxiety
Likely next stances	Eternalism, monism, specialness	Nihilism, ordinariness	Nobility, enjoyable usefulness
Accomplishment	Authenticity in sense of living from true self instead of regular self	Egolessness	Conjuring supple, playful magic in the shared self/other space
How it causes suffering	Attempts to retrieve supposed true self fail; attempts to live up to it fail	Neglecting practical personal affairs
Obstacles to maintaining the stance	Non-existence of true self	Manifestations of regular self	Fear of discontinuity; cannot repair or remove self
Antidotes; counter-thoughts	No essential nature, no coherent true self	I have much in common with who I was and will be
Intelligent aspect	Recognizes negative social conditioning & possibility of spontaneity	Recognizes lack of essential nature or durable continuity
Positive appropriation after resolution	Points toward power of nobility: we can be much more than we generally pretend	Points toward generosity of nobility

Stance	Mission	Materialism	Enjoyable usefulness
Summary	Only eternal purposes are meaningful	Only mundane purposes are meaningful	All purposes are meaningful, when they are. Do things that are useful and enjoyable.
What it denies	Value of mundane purposes	Value of eternal purposes
What it fixates	Value of eternal purposes	Value of mundane purposes
The sales pitch	Find and follow your true mission, and the universe resonates with you	He who dies with the most toys, wins	There is no scoreboard
Emotional appeal	Exciting, personal, transcendent purpose lifts you out of mundanity	Get what you want
Pattern of thinking	Fantasy; non-ordinary methods for seeking the supposed true mission	Grim self-interest	Flow
Likely next stances	Eternalism; specialness, true self	Nihilism; ordinariness	Nobility, intermittently continuing
Accomplishment	Sacrifice all mundane purposes to eternal mission (saintliness)	Exclusive self-interest	Rennaisance person
How it causes suffering	Can never find your supposed true mission; neglect mundane aspects of life	Can never get enough; alienation from others and from authentic creativity
Obstacles to maintaining the stance	Reasonable self-interest	Compassion, creativity	Is that it? No hope of completing purpose, so no hope for salvation or basis for self-congratulation
Antidotes; counter-thoughts	Mundane purposes matter to me	I do care about others, and about creative work
Intelligent aspect	Eternal purposes are valid; materialism is unsatisfying	Mundane purposes are valid; mission is a fantasy
Positive appropriation after resolution	Creativity and generosity are aspects of enjoyable usefulness	Material satisfaction and accomplishment are aspects of enjoyable usefulness

Stance	Specialness	Ordinariness	Nobility
Summary	I have a distinct and superior value given by the eternal ordering principle	My value comes from being like everyone else	Developing all my abilities in order to serve others
What it denies	Shared humanity	Unusualness
What it fixates	Personal value	Personal value
The sales pitch	You are better than they are	Don’t put on airs	Be all you can be
Emotional appeal	Reinforces ego	No need to live up to potential
Pattern of thinking	Disdain; self-aggrandisement	Fearfulness, laziness	Impeccability
Likely next stances	Mission, true self	Materialism	Enjoyable usefulness
Accomplishment	Autoapotheosis	Baaaaaa	Heroism
How it causes suffering	Ego-trips; role anxiety; need for constant confirmation	Suppression of individuality
Obstacles to maintaining the stance	Familiarity of experience; maintaining image is exhausting	Unusual impulses; cannot conform to herd	Selfishness; fear; laziness
Antidotes; counter-thoughts	Recognition of shared humanity	Recognition of potential and uniqueness
Intelligent aspect	Recognition of potential and uniqueness	Recognition of shared humanity
Positive appropriation after resolution	Nobility does rise above the ordinary	Humility is an aspect of nobility